California Adventure Rope Drop Strategy

In this week's episode, Jared shares with us his California Adventure Rope Drop Strategy that is opposite of what you'd think!  Listen to find his secrets! 

Transcript

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On this week's episode of a Dryer Dose of Disney, Jared gives us his unconventional rope drop strategy for California Adventure. Welcome to another episode of a Dryer Dose of Disney. I'm your host, Jared Dryer. And today we've got your rope drop strategy for California adventure out in Anaheim. Obviously any time, you're going to the parks. You want to go into it with a strategy in mind, and today we're going to help you knock out California adventure and make your wait times as short as possible and make this park as easy as possible for you to navigate. Full disclosure. There are more than one strategies. When it comes to rope drop, there's a lot of different ways that you can get out there into the park and hit all the rides that you want. And in fact, Out of all eight episodes for rope drop strategy. This is the one episode that I will say we probably do it so much more differently than anyone else does that. You'll probably either have questions or people may look at you a little bit funny with our recommendations, but trust me, when I say listen all the way to the end until you, hear our I can do this all day tip of the day. But we're going to save you a ton of time at California adventure. We're going to get you on every single ride. You're going to have a great time and you're going to have the shortest wait times all day. If you follow our method here and this one is tried and true, we've been there a dozen times or more. And we use this method even still today. With the new upgrades in the park and it's a great one. The most important thing though, that I want you to think about when you are going to do a rope drop strategy, and you're looking at your navigation plan for the park. Is, are there any rides that my family absolutely must ride? And if so, we always encourage you. Do those first thing in the morning. The reason is sometimes rides can go down, but you want to make sure you get that one done because you may want to come back and do it later. But if you're looking to hit the entire park ride, every single ride, even some of them multiple times, then trust me. When I say you're going to want to follow our strategy with you today. Okay. And this is actually going to be a shorter episode because it is so easy. To do our rope drop strategy at California adventure. And you're going to get on every single ride. So you're going to absolutely love it. So when you go to California adventure, if you're familiar, obviously with Disney land in California, venture, they're parked right across from each other. You're going to be backed up outside of the park, waiting to get in through the turnstile. And they're going to let you in, when it's time. Now, if you're on resort, you do get in 30 minutes in advance. Our recommendation for those that are on resort is only slightly different. And that would be is if you're on resort. We do recommend, you may want to either do the new Spiderman ride out in the Avengers campus, Or you may want to do cars land, the, radiator Springs Raceway right out of the gates. So as soon as you get going, you may want to hit one of those two rides. That will probably take up the majority of your 30 minutes, but then we're going to tell you follow the rest of our strategy. And the reason is you typically do not need to hit those two rides right out of the gates, because that's what everyone else is going to do. And this is one of those incidences where it is much better. To go knock out the other rides in the park, eliminate your long wait times at those, and then come back to your two busiest rides at the end of the day. Without any further ado, let's dive right into it. So you are a regular, guest over at California Adventure. You are not on resort and you are, getting in to the park the same time as everyone else. You're going to follow the flood of people. Everyone's going to go in and they are going to go over to either the Spiderman ride, the newest one over there in the Avenger's campus. Or they're going to go over to radiator Springs, racers and cars land. Don't do it. Do not follow them. Keep going. You are going to go further and you're going to go down to Pixar pier. And when you go to Pixar pier, your first ride of the day is going to be toy story, midway mania. This one is a very popular, ride. it's probably going to be people's third or fourth ride that they're going to do for the day. And what you're going to see is you're going to see just a huge cluster of people just congregate onto the Pixar pier, and it's going to get so clogged down. It's going to really inhibit you from moving around or getting to other rides. And your wait times are going to be very long later in the day. We say do midway mania first, right out of the gates. And as soon as you're done with that, you're going to go over to the Incredicoaster, which is an awesome ride. And Incredicoaster more often than not is running their single rider line. You shouldn't see a wait at this time of day, just because if you went straight to midway mania, no, one's made their way down to the pier yet. You're going to be first on, first off, and you're going to be able to go do Incredicoaster as well, probably with the wait time of less than two to three minutes. And once you're done with incredicoaster, we're going to tell you, keep going further down the pier. There's a lot of little rides down here. You have the huge Ferris wheel you've got, around the corner. You've got the jellyfish jumpers. You've got the Zeppelins. You've got Goofy's fly school and we're going to tell you, knock those out, if you want to ride those rides. Sure. Later in the day, your wait time for those is probably only going to be, 20 minutes or so the silly symphony swings is usually less than five. But go ahead and knock off those rights. If those are rights that you're interested in doing the one I will tell you, you want to do at this point in time is goofy fly school. That ride can get up to 45 minutes. Long for the wait time, sometimes longer. And this is a great time to do it cause no one's down there. So go ahead and knock out the majority of the pier and work your way back up. When you come back up from Goofy's fly school, you're getting back towards the main area. And of course, then you're going to want to hit the undersea adventure with, Little mermaid and do that ride. From there. You're going to hang a left and you're going to start making your way up towards grizzly river rapids. And if that's a ride you'd like to do, go ahead and do it at this point in time, you will get soaking wet. So if you have a poncho rain jacket or you have. A change of shoes, which is what we talk about in our must bring items to the parks. Go ahead and do that and ride the grizzly river rapids. If you don't want to get wet, keep on moving towards Soarin'. And you're now going to want to knock out Soarin'. It should still be probably within the first hour of the day or the first 90 minutes of the day at this point. Soarin' should probably only have a 10 or 15 minute wait, worst case. Go ahead and knock that out. That is one of the longer waits in the park because the load and unload times are so long. There is no single rider and they should totally have single rider at Soarin'. But Soarin' is a great ride to knock out at this point in the day. When you're done with that, you're going to cross that little main street area, and you're going to go over to the monsters Inc. Ride and get that one done. That ride usually does not get busy until the afternoon, but in the afternoon, that ride is typically a 45 to 60 minute. Wait. And the reason is there's not a ton of rides at California adventure. And later in the day, people are starting to knock out the rides they haven't done. And that one always gets backed up. So knock out monsters, Inc. And then from there, you're going to work your way down towards mission breakout. So this is going to be the guardians of the galaxy ride. This is my favorite ride in the park. This is the one that I think is probably the best. This is one that I would say, if you get a chance to ride it multiple times, please do. Because each time you ride it, it's different and they played different music. So it's a very fun ride. That's always going to be a unique experience. So go do mission breakout. And once you're done with mission breakout, all that you have left at this point. Is the rest of the Avengers, campus and cars land. You're going to want to go into the Avengers campus and you're going to get ready to do Spider-Man. This is where I'm going to bring in the, I can do this all day tip of the day for California Adventure. And that is for Spiderman. And for radiator Springs racers, you have single rider and you want to use single rider at California Adventure on these two rides. It is not worth waiting over an hour in the general queue to get into these rides. When you can go wait just a few minutes and do single rider. Of course, once you're done with Spiderman head over to radiator Springs racers. And once you're done with that, you've got Luigi's tires, which is a dancing ride, and you've got Mater's Roundup, which is going to be a spinning ride. You can do those as well, but there are a ton of great things to eat at this park and great restaurants. So we encourage you. Go check those out on our episode around restaurants at California adventure. And I'll make some call-outs there. That there's a great item in the cozy cone motels, there is a great dessert out on Pixar pier. There is a great restaurant. We try to hit every single time that we go to California adventure. And there is a new one over in the Avenger's campus that we're going to talk about. Some of the items that we've had there, including a peanut butter and jelly. Drink. That was actually really good. So you'll definitely want to tune into that episode. So thank you for listening today. If any of these tips or tricks helped you, please subscribe to our channel. Please contribute to us over at Patreon so we can keep this podcast going and we hope your vacations, a magical one. And we will talk to you next time. Bye bye