Keep Moving Forward...

I think it's safe to say that anyone who is a Disney-phile is probably very familiar with this saying from Walt Disney; "Keep Moving Forward". The alternative is, obviously, if you're not moving forward you're either standing still or moving backwards, and those two are pretty much interchangeable with each other.

Days in the Park continues to do better than I had ever foreseen it doing; we average around 2,000 views a week, and that's without posting new articles every day, but from traffic all of my old articles are generating. I couldn't be happier that people are still finding us, and in fact, if you type in "Disneyland Blog" into Google or any other engine for that matter, there you'll find me, right near the top somewhere.

 But in spite of how well (at least to me) it continues to do, I've missed blogging on a regular basis. I've thought many times over the past few months how I would broach the subject of what's been going on, and I guess the best way to say it is that the last year or so has been rough. We've been in the process of trying to move our family into a house (finally!), there have been some bullying issues with one of my children at school which led to me becoming a homeschooling dad (something I never saw coming!), and I myself have had a whole range of health problems including being diagnosed with GERD (which damaged my esophagus and caused me pain for several months) and also being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. It's been rough! As a consequence, I let "Days" slide when what I probably should have been doing was to continue to use it as an outlet and a way of reaching out like I always had. It was bad enough that at one point I went almost three months without even setting foot inside Disneyland because there was that much, let's just call it what it was, crap going on in my life.

But my place and mindset are all better now, I'm happy, and I'm ready to write! I miss my 20-30 minutes of writing every day, and I need to get back to it. It's always made me happy to share with anyone who wants to stop by and read, so that's exactly what I'm going to start doing again!

The time to move forward has come. I hope you'll be there to take those steps with me!

Live, learn, love and much magic!
-Chad

Limited Time Magic: Long Lost Friends ("Character Fan Days 2.0!")

Welcome to those of you joining me from Disney Babies Blog and those of you just hopping aboard. I am the Final stop on our Magical Blogorail.

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As many Park fans know (both on the East AND West coasts) Disney has for some time been running their annual programs; this year's has been aptly dubbed (to the chagrin of many, though) "Limited Time Magic". Over the course of the last few months, they've had (for limited amounts of times) different special occasions occurring all over The Parks, including bringing the Golden Horseshoe Revue back to the Golden Horseshoe in Frontierland, Mardi Gras in New Orleans Square, and the world famous Dapper Dans singing tunes from boy bands (no comment on that one).

A couple of years ago, Disneyland ran a similar program called "Family Fun Days" on consecutive weekends, and the star of that particular promotion was by far one weekend dubbed "Character Fan Days". In this particular instance, readers of the Disney Parks Blog were invited to vote on several sets of Disney characters who hadn't been seen in The Parks in quite some time, and the winners were brought out over the course of the weekend for a very special meet and greet in the Festival Arena behind Big Thunder Ranch BBQ.  This was back in January of 2011, and since then I've been telling anyone who would listen that Disneyland needed to bring this ultra-popular weekend back, and soon!  Imagine my surprise when I suddenly found out last weekend that they were doing it again this year, only allowing it to last for an entire week, and calling it "Long Lost Friends".  I could not have been happier!  There were ten different groups of characters in rotation this year, and I managed to meet all but one group; unfortunately, I missed the group from "Pocahontas" which was the one I really wanted to see by a lousy three people, but in the end my three hour trek through line after line was more than worth it, and I had a really wonderful time meeting characters I had never seen out and about before, and I thought I would share that with the readers today.

Hopefully my happiness is evident in all of the pictures here.  All good things have to come to an end, and we've already moved on to another "Limited Time Magic", this one with Tinkerbell and her fairy friends (although Vidia and I certainly need to meet and have a chat!).  I hope that Disneyland will continue to do weekends like this and allow the hardcore among us to continue to meet these special characters we so rarely get a chance to see.  Judging by the number of people who were there on Sunday afternoon, I can only assume the week was a huge success, and I certainly hope that Disneyland was watching.  As Park hounds, we were truly grateful for this awesome opportunity set before us.

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Thank you for joining Magical Blogorail Blue this month. We will be back Friday, May 10th with an all new theme. Keep checking in with our blogs in between loops to keep up to date with our Disney info, photos and stories. If you are looking for more Disney magic, you can make your way over to The Magical Blogorail website to see all our members and their blogs, as well as all our previous loops.

Here is the map of our Magical Blogorail should you happen to have to make a stop along the way and want to reboard:
1st Stop ~ Pursuing the Magic
2nd Stop ~ The CanaDisney Blog
3rd Stop ~ Disney Babies Blog
Final Stop ~ Days in the Park

"Domino" by Jessie J - covered by the Mad T Party Band (Disney Californi...

This week's video from the Mad T Party at Disney California Adventure Park is of our favorite characters covering the popular song "Domino" by singer Jessie J. As one of the songs that debuted early during the Spring Break season, we thought it would make an excellent addition to the blog, so please enjoy!


If you like what you see, please consider subscribing to our YouTube Channel! We have all kinds of goodies from the Happiest Place on Earth.
You can find us at www.youtube.com/daysintheparkYT
Hope to see you there!

Throwback Thursday - Hanging with the Hunchback (Gang)

Since I'm trying to get the blog going again more than it has been the last few months, I thought a move to simpler articles with lots of pictures and videos might be the way to go. After all, those aren't too difficult to do, right?

So in that vein I've decided to begin weekly Throwback Thursday articles and pictures. Lord know I've been going to The Parks long enough now to have a veritable treasure trove of goodies I can post here, and people might like them, too!

I decided to post one today from January of 2011 which we took shortly after creating this blog. It's always been one of my favorites, and the entire reason we went to The Park that day was to see rare characters like this, and it didn't hurt that I was half in love with Esmerelda, either.

With that said, here's Amy, Mark, and myself chilling with Clopin, Esmerelda and Claude Frollo. Enjoy!