Earlier this year, I was looking at Google Flights as I’m wont to do from time to time and I found that flights from Inverness (my closest airport) to Los Angeles were, while perhaps not ‘super cheap’, a lot cheaper than I expected them to be.
I’ve never been to Los Angeles (or California) before, bar a quick trip through LAX for a connecting flight and perhaps most importantly, I’ve never been to Disneyland. If I could figure out a way to keep it all relatively cheap, it’d be worth doing, right?
Having successfully turned Connor into a Disney Adult, I priced up a trip for two people to California/Los Angeles for a little over a week. Comprising of flights, hotels and park tickets for both Disney and Universal and in total it came out to just over £1000 each – though that’s with the addition of Tesco Clubcard hotel vouchers which brings the cost of one of the hotels (if used on only one) down to next to nothing, which is handy!
The hotel I chose for Disney, for pricing at least, nothing’s final. Was the Clarion Hotel Anaheim. It’s listed as one of Disney’s “Good Neighbor Hotels”, which sounds great, but seemingly means next to nothing, besides the fact that it’s relatively close by. To me, on the map, it looked to be within walking distance, but in the year of our lord, twenty-twenty-three, I wanted to see what it was like on the inside, from people that have actually been, so off to YouTube I went.
The first video I found was from The Disneyland Beat, their video was about ‘A Disneyland Hotel Guide’, they mostly mentioned the hotels across the street from Disneyland, with the hotel I was looking at mentioned toward the end, but being dismissed by them as ‘too far to walk’.
Too far?!
The next video I watched was from a small channel called Carson’s World, he and his family had actually stayed at the hotel I was looking at and in one of his videos, after taking transport to Disney from the hotel, he had to go back to the hotel to drop something off and opted to walk it. Timing himself, he was able to walk from Disney security, to the hotel, go to his room (which was up on one of the top floors), drop off what he needed to drop off, leave the hotel, realise he’d forgotten something, go back and get it and get back to Disney within 40 minutes, which without the forgetting of items, brings it to realistically, a 15 minute walk each way.
And yet, in his comments? – Someone saying that it would be too far to walk…
It got me curious. Both times Connor and I have been to Disneyland Paris, we have stayed at Hotel Cheyenne. One of the cheaper Disney owned Hotels on property. While there is a bus provided and we have used it, most of the time we opted to walk to the parks and back again at the end of the day. How far was that walk?
As you can see, the distance in Paris is actually longer than the distance in Anaheim. Not by a huge amount, but still. And yet, when in Paris, we didn’t give it a second thought to walking to the parks in the morning or back at night.
One argument that could be made is that in Paris, you’re in the Disney bubble. The walk is entirely within Disney property and as such, you’re going to feel safer there than you might in Anaheim where your walk is along a busy road in the middle of a city (even if Disneyland Resort is right next to you the whole time, it’s not technically Disney property).
But then I found this video from Chris Roode, who cycles from the hotel next door to the Clarion and follows the route presented above, and while there is a busy road you have to cross (via a crosswalk), the majority of the path is pretty nice and tree-lined. So it’s not like you’re walking down crack alley to get to your destination either.
The main conclusion of this ‘research’? – Americans are lazy as fuck.
And in my day-to-day life, I’m certainly in no position to judge anyone on their levels of laziness. But if the choice is waiting 10-15mins for a bus to show up to take me a half mile down the road, or walk that half mile? I’m walking it. Even after a day at Disney, with sore feet, I’d rather walk the extra distance instead of standing around waiting. The pain is less when moving!