Tokyo Disneyland Winter Trip Report – Part 3
Part 3 of our Tokyo Disneyland Winter Trip Report picks up at the start of our first day at Tokyo Disneyland. The park didn’t open until 9 a.m., but we all once again woke up by like 5 a.m., so we made it to the park far in advance of park opening. First, though, we made a detour over to Disney’s Ambassador Hotel, where we were hoping for breakfast at Tick Tock Diner.
Ikspiari was not open when we arrived, meaning we had to walk along the road to get over to Tick Tock Diner. This took us a few minutes to figure out how to accomplish, but ultimately was not too difficult. The real problem was that Tick Tock Diner did not open until 11:30 a.m. So much for having kawaii Mickey body parts for breakfast.
Instead, I continued my glorious tradition of pizza potato chips for breakfast. (The other cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast.) After grabbing chips and a few other things from the Ambassador Hotel’s gift shop, we took the bus to Tokyo Disneyland. We arrived maybe 30 minutes before opening…
I’m always interested in trying new strategies to improve our 1-Day Tokyo Disneyland Itinerary, and this particular morning I thought it might make sense to skip the Monster’s Inc. Ride & Go Seek FastPass line (which can be ~10 minutes long on even moderately crowded days) in favor of Pooh’s Hunny Hunt FastPasses.
My hope here was that we could get ahead of the ‘wave’ of the crowd by grabbing the Hunny Hunt FastPass, potentially doing Hunny Hunt via standby, and then going to Peter Pan’s Flight. This experiment turned out so-so.
We were able to grab the Hunny Hunt FastPass with zero wait and do Hunny Hunt as a walk-on, but by the time we got to Peter Pan’s Flight, the actual wait was 15 minutes. The good news is that I now have a strong idea of how a 2-Day Tokyo Disneyland Itinerary should look.
With those two attractions down, we headed over to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. We could have done that with minimal wait but we noticed that Camp Woodchuck Kitchen was opening soon. Of course, we “had” to rope drop that.
Camp Woodchuck replaced Lucky Nugget Cafe, which was really nothing noteworthy: just ordering windows and a covered seating area off to the side. Camp Woodchuck Kitchen uses the same ordering windows, but replaced the seating area with a multi-story structure including seating and a meet & greet.
The interior of the restaurant’s seating area was already open, so I started out by going inside to take photos of it. I was blown away. I’ll do a full review of the restaurant in the near future, but for now, here are a few photos showing off the highlights.
Camp Woodchuck Kitchen is definitely not the best-themed restaurant at Tokyo Disneyland, nor does it have the best food. In fact, it might not crack the top 5 in either regard. Where it excels is that it offers a great place to just be.
The best Tokyo Disneyland restaurants are also the most popular (as you’d expect), and aren’t exactly places you’d go as a respite from the crowds or to unwind after a long day. Camp Woodchuck Kitchen is exactly that.
From the fireplace inside to a faux fire pit outside (I soooo wish it produced actual heat during this winter trip) to just random tables tucked away in corners, Camp Woodchuck Kitchen is a great place to be.
This is furthered by two excellent background music loops. The exterior loop can be found here, and features folksy instrumental versions of Disney (and other) songs you’ll recognize. The interior loop features music of the same nature, but with lyrics and without a Disney connection. Both loops are tremendous and made me want to hang around for a while.
After lunch, we headed to the merchandise kiosk where Camp Woodchuck items were being sold. Since this is new, it has location-specific items. It’s rare for Tokyo Disneyland to do park specific merchandise, and attraction/restaurant/etc-specific merchandise is unheard of outside of an attraction opening or closing. As such, we wanted to take advantage of this opportunity.
We were pretty excited about all of the options, and toyed with the idea of purchasing all of the merit badges, hats, and scarves so we could attend Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party as Junior Woodchucks. We actually debated this all afternoon, until the reality that these costumes would cost $150+ set in. (I still think it would be a great costume idea, but spending so much money was out of the question for us.)
From there, we spent some time wandering Frontierland and Adventureland, strolling through gift shops and soaking up the ambiance.
We also noticed that several ‘streetmosphere’ acts were out that we had never seen before. This struck us as sort of odd; given the costumes of the Adventureland band, they did not look new; we’ve been to the park on far busier days, and yet have never seen an act like this.
Perhaps we’ve just been unlucky? Maybe this is an act that used to perform, and had been cut and reinstated? Something else? I don’t really know what the explanation, but I’m all for more streetmosphere entertainment!
Following that, we headed over to the Coral Landing subland in Adventureland for some serious snacking at Squeezers and Boiler Room Bites.
I know what you’re thinking: “Tom, that is one stylish sweater! How can you justify wearing such fancy couture to the parks knowing it might get damaged?!”
It thus might surprise you to learn that this hella fly Olaf sweater was on sale for only $9. I know, right?! You never see Gucci, Burberry, Saint Laurent, or the other heavy hitters in fashion this cheap. Had to have been a price mistake.
We were so hyped on the Snowgie bao that we recorded this video about them…
…And now you’ve wasted time you’ll never get back and still know absolutely nothing new about how this snack tasted. 😉
They were good, albeit with an odd mix of flavors: purple potato, strawberry, salmon, and “meat.” I know my motto is “meat” goes with everything, but purple potato, strawberry, and (air quotes) meat is not what I had in mind. The salmon was the best flavor here and deserving of its own bao. (In fact, these were each individually good, but the sweet cream flavors were a sharp, non-complementary clash to the savory meats.)
After that freight train ride through Flavortown (in fairness, it’s probably better than whatever Guy Fieri has spewed forth from the depths of Flavortown for the Planet Hollywood Observatory menu), it was time to test our stomaches with a ride aboard the wildest ride in the wilderness! Click here to continue reading on Page 2…
I am one of those weirdos who favours the words over the (very lovely) photos so thank you for another great read 🙂
I agree, I can’t get enough info about TDR! I love the way you write Tom and think each trip report I’ve read is very well balanced and flows nicely!
More, more, more!
Great post as always 🙂
The Snowgies look fascinating! Lovely photos, as ever.
Thanks for putting these together. I know it must take a large chunk of effort but it’s greatly appreciated so people can live vicariously through your adventures.
You’re welcome–thanks for reading! It is a lot of effort, but it ensures I get the photos edited and write down the experience, which is good, too.
Man, I’d go to Tokyo Disney JUST for Aristocats.
After we left, they released a new line of Aristocats merchandise. Sarah is already eyeing a few items…
I love the bicycling piano man. I saw the same cast member on my last trip, and he was really great. It’s funny how something as relatively small as that can cause so much happiness!
I believe he is the only bicycle piano man Tokyo Disneyland has–and has ever had. Pretty impressive!
The snowgie bao… why oh why can’t we have anything that awesome here in the US??
There are multiple blogs dedicated to food at Walt Disney World, so I’m honestly shocked Disney doesn’t do anything like this stateside. I think there’s a HUGE market for it. The Instagram photos alone would be great free advertising (and I’m not even kidding).
My visit last year was also during Frozen Fantasy, and I loved the Snowgie bao! I viewed it as pretty much a whole meal in one, when eaten in the proper sequence. (Funny story: I misunderstood the signage and thought you could choose the filling you wanted from the four listed. The Cast Member then explained–via a “Head-and-shoulders, knees-and-toes”-type pantomime and simple English–that the head was meat, the “tummy” was salmon, and “sweet feet.”) If Lucky Fortune Cookery had something like these, I might actually eat there.
Aside from maybe Compass of Your Heart, no song got stuck in my head more than the theme from Happiness is Here. The energy of both the music and the performers was completely infectious. Hopefully I’ll get back to catch it once more before it’s inevitably replaced for the 35th.
I agree with you on Big Thunder Mountain, though my friend who went a few months after me argues Tokyo’s is the best of the four. It was Tokyo’s Splash Mountain that blew me away, both the queue and the ride. I was also pleasantly surprised by their “it’s a small world,” especially the 360 mural in the loading area.
Your trip reports have me itching to go back to Tokyo this spring rather than Hong Kong & Shanghai. It’s tough knowing Tokyo is the better of the two choices, but the completionist need to do HKDL/SHDL is pretty strong. Do you have any thoughts?
That Snowgie bao story is hilarious.
As for what I’d do–if I could only take one Disney trip per year, it would be to Tokyo every single year. I can understand the completionist pull, too, and HKDL/SDL is a good duo, but neither live up to Tokyo Disney Resort.
My expectations for Hong Kong & Shanghai are definitely measured as compared to Tokyo (which were sky-high and met at nearly every turn), but the nerd in me needs that Badge of Honor of having visited all twelve parks.
There’s always the Disney Pacific Rim Grand Tour, but the complexities of airfare/visa requirements–and likely lack of time to sightsee outside the parks in Hong Kong & Shanghai if I were to give each park its proper time commitment–are definitely a deterrent, no matter the desire to pull it off.
Can’t wait for the next installment!! Thanks again for doing these trip reports for us. They’re always incredible!
Freight Train to Flavortown…..lol!!! I’m busting up over here and my co-workers have no clue. Camp Woodchuck Kitchen looks wonderful! Great pictures…looking forward to that on our next visit in June. We’ve been to Tokyo Disneyland three times and have never seen the original Country Bear show, it’s always been the summer vacation one…which is fun! So my favorite line, “That’s a mighty BIG song Trixie……..that ain’t all that’s big!” is still in the TDL version? AWESOME!!! I can speculate as to why WDW removed that comment and why TDL leaves it in….I mean, well….I guess its obvious to those who have spent a lot of time at WDW and Japan. Anyways…looking forward to the “disaster” edition!
While some of the potentially more “offensive” material was cut from the Walt Disney World version, I think it was done more on the basis of shortening the show (several minutes of jokes were cut) than due to it being offensive.
So really, there’s more of a commentary on American attention spans than waistlines…
Thanks for sharing the BGM loop for Camp Woodchuck – I’m curious, isn’t the non-fiddle stuff mostly pulled from the old Character Grove music from Animal Kingdom? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fadZlDJCxE) That doesn’t make me like it any less, but it does make me curious if they keep a giant archive of music somewhere and then dig through it when sound designing new areas.
It wouldn’t surprise me. Even in the “original” second gate, Port Discovery pulls heavily from Epcot’s entrance BGM, and I’m pretty sure Cape Cod is exactly the same as Columbia Harbour House (if not, the differences are only slight).
Great report! Funny thing was, we did buy Canp Woodchuck merchandise and are going as Junior Woodchucks this year to Disney world and a Halloween Disney cruise! Too awesome to pass up!!
I’m loving the comments about the “cold”. It’s minus twenty Fahrenheit here today. Good to know that if my family ever goes to Tokyo Disney that we will have to bring our spring jackets for their winter.
An excellent trip report. While I always read the blocks of text because your opinions are well supported and thoughtful, I definitely appreciate the photos that are interjected in this latest trip report.
Well??? Don’t keep a girl hangin’!!! LOL
Looking forward to the next installment of “Where in the (Disney) World are the Brickers – The Tokyo Edition”
Tokyo’s Pirates’ best distinction for me was that the pirates still chased the women. Is that so in Paris as well (or was it before it closed for this next big refurbishment)? I haven’t made it there yet, but this was a significant difference from either US version for my party.