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:

Remembering when the Christmas tree at the Grand Californian Hotel caught fire

The Christmas tree on Main St., at Disneyland

Like most of us, Disneyland no longer uses a real Christmas Tree, on Main St.  They switched to a giant sixty food artificial tree in 2008.  A cast member told me this weekend that the switch was due to the time it took to put the lights on the real trees.  Now they store the artificial tree in a big warehouse and it is a lot quicker to deploy it, although it still takes a few days.

These artificial trees are not, by the way, fireproof.  Back in 2005 a similar tree went up in flames, at 3 am, at Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel, forcing a mass evacuation of thousands of guests.  I know, as I showed up the very next day to oversee the safety of the restoration workers, from American Technologies, who cleaned up the mess. 

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:

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.