Things you can still do during the holiday passport blackout at Disneyland

Disneyland’s annual passports are a great deal but if you own the Select Passport you are now blacked out for the holiday at Disneyland and California Adventures from Dec. 21, 2012 to January 6, 2013.  Even the regular passports are blacked out through January 5, 2013.  Ouch!

Don’t dismay however.  You can still have fun at the Disneyland resort even during the holiday blackout!  Here are the top ten ways to have fun at the Disneyland Resort while we wait for the holiday blackout to end:

Disneyland’s OSHA inspections, violations and complaints

The Walt Disney Company continues to be Orange County’s largest employer – adding 5,000 more jobs since they finished remodeling their California Adventures Park.  But if you are thinking about applying for one of those jobs, you may be interested in checking out their California Occupational Safety and Health Agency (OSHA) violations, complaints and inspection records.

This information is available to the public and can be found here.  There are 38 entries since 2007.

Does your favorite Disneyland restaurant have a clean bill of health?

Orange County’s Board of Supervisors rejected letter grade health ratings for our restaurants, so if you visit Disneyland, or California Adventures, you won’t know if their restaurants have had any food safety issues.  But don’t despair!  You can read all about their inspections online.

Disney does have a safety department that includes several full time food safety professionals – and most of them used to work for the County of Orange Health Agency, as restaurant health inspectors.  But the turnover at restaurants can be high, and Disneyland also employs a lot of youngsters, who may lack experience.  As such the Disney restaurants have pretty lengthy inspection records, that can make for interesting reading, to say the least.

Here are links to the restaurant inspection information for all of the restaurants at Disneyland:

About those Disneyland cats…

“Years ago — no one seems to know when — feral cats began to sneak into Disneyland, living among the park’s trees and shrubs during the day. At night, they venture out, and an estimated 200 cats now prowl through Disneyland and neighboring California Adventure Park,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

“What we do is trap the cats, get them spayed or neutered and make sure they get a wellness check and release them back into the population,” says Gina Mayberry, who works at Disneyland’s Circle D Ranch. Although Disneyland doesn’t monitor the total number of cats, she says the program has been quite successful at adopting out kittens and “maintaining a balance” between cat population and the Disneyland environment, according to Alley Cat Allies.

Bed bugs at Disneyland’s hotels?

Bed bugs have become a real problem throughout the United States over the past ten years.  They often show up in hotels and according to online reports they are allegedly even a problem at Disneyland’s Grand California Hotel and at Disneyland Hotel.  Consider this woeful tale, that was posted on August 25, 2012:

We stayed for 2 nights at the Grand Californian in July 2012. The first night only my husband was bitten, my the second night all 4 of us had bites. Mine being the worst, I went to the dermatologist to be certain and absolutely they were bed bug bites. We had to quarantine our luggage for 2 weeks and treated everything in them. Luckily we never brought them into our house but still we were on the look out for them for weeks after returning home.