By: InspireDiva
Frozen’s Anna and Elsa meet and greet has been one of the most popular attractions at Disneyland and World, for that matter, in recent years. But is that wait really worth all of the hype?
When Frozen came out my daughter and I jumped onto that bandwagon and never really looked back. The movie, characters, and music offering a triple threat of wonderful. How do you resist wonderful? I can tell you quite honestly that we did not. We saw the movie twice in theaters and bought the DVD the day it came out. We have listened to and sang our hearts out to the soundtrack in my car and watched many, many YouTube videos… not to mention the miscellaneous merchandise we have purchased. Because of this, and the fact that my daughter could easily be Anna reincarnated, we were highly anticipating our chance to meet them in person.
March came and we were off to Disneyland for our Spring Break adventure. It was a 6 day adventure at Disneyland let me tell you… it took us days to work up the courage to attempt it. Every day it was a 3-4 hour wait and every day we would think to ourselves we’ll get up early and get right in line tomorrow. If you have read my other articles you may have caught Zombie’s in Disneyland which is still a very accurate account of what my family is like when we go to Disneyland. Morning people we are not. So this never happened.
So on our final day we had no choice. If we wanted to meet them we had to wait in the 3-4 hour line. It was time to put on our big girl pants. The day was HOT and unfortunately most of the line is in the sun. There were many fussy, crying and children (we may have been some of them) that just didn’t understand why they had to stand there for that long. Some that were so excited that it all but shined out of them. That is how we started.
We were so excited and we imagined what would say and talk about. We each had a bottle of water and each other. After an hour our bottles of water were gone and we were melting. So off I go to get provisions and then we wait, and we wait, and we wait…
We have taken pictures of each other with our phones and chatted with other people in the line. (I spilt a frozen apple juice on my white shirt, thank you young lady that gave me some baby wipes so I could save my shirt.) Time seems “frozen” and my husband and son who willingly went off to do their own thing, have now been on The Matterhorn, Space Mountain, and Star Tours and had lunch. They are now waiting at the exit for us. We are almost there and a robotic Olaf has made an appearance on the roof and entertains us momentarily, the excitement starts coming back we get a little giddy. It is finally our turn.
We stumble into the dark room (I mean the sun has blinded us or something) it is dark, both Anna and Elsa are there which I am currently thanking God for because if it would have only been Elsa I think the apocalypse may have come for my Anna obsessed daughter. There would have been tears, and I become speechless just thinking of it…but they were both there. Whew! Crisis averted. All of a sudden I look up, I look at my daughter and she is already getting her picture taken. What is happening? It has only been seconds!!! I try and get the camera set up on my phone, they are already wrapping things up and scanning the photo pass plus. But wait, I waited in line too don’t I get a picture?! I actually have to ask and they do let me sneak in a shot with me and my daughter and the photographer takes my phone and gets a few shots. Everyone smiles politely as they hurry us right out like we are on an invisible conveyer belt and as the curtain falls into place behind us, we are done. We are in and out of that room in less than 2 minutes I swear!
We meet up with my hubby and son right outside and I automatically pull out my camera we probably got some great shots. Sadly, no the lighting was terrible and the photographer took my photos in sepia. I don’t even know how to do that! I still don’t! I didn’t have much of a chance to take any shots myself and I feel cheated. My daughter reminds me that we have the photo pass plus so there should be some good shots of us on there. We check them out but mostly they’re nothing as magical as we dreamed of. One however makes me thrilled to have bought the photo pass plus.
In the normal scheme of things I am all for character meet and greets. It is one of my favorite things. But there is a point where they become not worth it and this is one of them. Waiting 4 hours in line is so much time lost. You could be doing anything else at Disneyland and anything else at Disneyland is going to be awesome! I felt that the magic was lost. Sure the girls were beautiful and we got to meet them but the chatting was minimal and the connection that everyone looks for when meeting a favorite character was missing. It was lost in that 4 hour line and the hustle to keep that line moving. I quite honestly would never put myself or anyone else through that experience again. I was left disappointed. My recommendation would be to wait for that hype to die down. We went back in June and we were able to do meet all 3 princesses in the Princess Fantasy Fair, plus meet Merida, and my favorites Flynn and Rapunzel all in roughly one hour. We skipped the Frozen ladies on that trip.
We learned our lesson.
