My Adventureland-specifc blog has now been merged into this main Park Hopping blog. All old articles and photos should now be here, though some of the images still need some work.
The Adventureland Iowa sub-section still remains to host the Adventureland Wiki project:
That wiki contains historical information of every ride, shop, show and food location that I could find information on. It is missing much from the 70s and 80s, before I moved to Iowa, but should be fairly complete since I started visiting the park in 1995.
Adventureland photos remain in my Theme Parks gallery:
I have begun the process of merging the Adventureland Iowa content from Adventureland.parkhopping.com over to this main Park Hopping blog. Things will be messed up (especially images) for a bit…
Yep, dozens of visitors still end up at this blog! Huzzah.
I am a bit late on this update, but if you compare the Top 10 articles of 2023 to this year, you will see something interesting. It appears this site is slowly attracting Silver Dollar City visitors. This makes me happy, since this is a park I knew basically nothing about. I had visited one time as a teenager in 1984, then finally got back in 2024. Since it is just a “short” 6-hour drive down the road, I am now kicking myself for not making the trip sooner. It is far more affordable than most of the other theme parks I have visited.
Anywho, here is the list of the Top 10 most-viewed from 2024.
Oops. A plug-in update took down this site this weekend. I found the culprit and got it back online. Seems this has happened, at one time or another, to every WordPress site I run. It seems so common there are even WordPress support pages showing ways to fix it.
Over the next few weeks I will be working on an update to the photo galleries. Over 6200 photos will be added (yes, it they include plenty of photos of walls and trash cans and other details I found interesting).
I also want to write up thoughts on Discovery Cove (spoiler: probably my favorite Orlando thing now, if the price is right for a visit–and that comes from someone who hates getting in public pools or water parks).
There were some wonderful team members, cast members, and ambassadors encountered along the way, too, so some shout-outs to them too (such as Biebs at Duff Brewery, who, along with John, seem to be there every time we visit).
New photos from Fantastic Caverns will be showing up “soon” in the misc.disneyfans.com gallery. Near Kansas City you start seeing billboards for this place as you head south. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were hundreds of them on the way to Springfield, Missouri. There was one moment where we could see five of them at the same time. This, and tourism brochures, must be where they spend their advertising budget.
For those who have never had the pleasure to see all these billboards, they show a red jeep, loaded with passengers, pulling a red trailer, also loaded with passengers, through a cavern of stalagmites and stalagtites. This is what sets Fantastic Caverns apart from the half dozen or more caves I got to explore when I first visited the Branson, Missouri/Eureka Springs, Arkansas area as a teenage in 1984. All the other caverns you spend walking down (and up) stairs. I had incorrectly throught doing a “ride through” cavern tour would be lame, so I never put forth any effort to go see it.
After finally deciding to put forth effort to see it last year, we spent the extra $5 to upgrade to a yearly pass. This allowed us to see it again this year for free. Bonus.
You can find some photos from 2023 here. As I went to copy that link, I realize I have incorrectly placed Fantastic Caverns in my Branson, Missouri gallery, and it is about an hour or so away from Branson. I guess I’ll fix that when I update with this new batch.
Meanwhile, Silver Dollar City is a place I got to explore in 1984, and I told myself back then I should really do this again in forty years. So in 2024, I did. The three things I remembered from my first visit were still there! The Flooded Mine (though now it is a shooting gallery ride, and was missing one specific scene I was looking for), Grandfather’s Mansion (kind of a tilt house), and Fire in the Hole — an indoor roller coaster dark ride. Fire in the Hole actually closed in 2023, but a brand new one was built elsewhere in the park for 2024. The new remake is great, though I do not remember any specific details of the original to know how close or different it is to the original. (I did notice a female fire fighter mannequin in it, which I expect was not there in the 1970s version.)
The park has very strict photography/video rules, and only allows it on the steam train and Flooded Mine, so those will be the only rides I have any on-ride photos from. (Yep, lots of rule breakers on YouTube, I know.)
There is far too much to see and do at Silver Dollar City in one day, so my photos from this trip will barely scratch the surface of what this park has to offer. I was far more than I expected or remembered.
This year, Universal had 18 food/drink booths, and SeaWorld had 28. It was quite the challenge to visit each one and take photos. Hopefully, I didn’t miss any this year… I hope to share some articles comparing the two different food events. We enjoyed both of them far better than we did the last time we went to EPCOT Food & Wine. As someone who grew up a Disneyland/Disney World kid since the 1970s, I never thought I’d say that!
We also got to visit the re-opened Mel’s Drive In on its first day open to the public (Tuesday, February 27, 2024). I had never eaten there, so it was a good excuse to try it out and get some new photos.
I also captured some more raw footage with my VR360 camera which I will share to my YouTube channel at some point.
Another upcoming project is to create a detailed page about the annual pass and how much it can save, even if you are an out-of-state visitor like I am. If you stay on site at a Universal hotel, you can save even more with pass discounts on rooms (sometimes; only a few trips have ever had them available–usually it’s just “Seasonal Rate”). For example, after several three-night hotel stays over the course of the year with the pass, the savings are more than what two Premium (most expensive) Universal APs cost! I have spreadsheets going back several years documenting the savings…
I don’t like to brag, but literally dozens of folks visit this site every year. They tend to come here mostly via web searches for specific topics. For 2023, here were the most-viewed articles on this site:
Here is what those articles are about, in case you wanted to check them out in 2024…
“It seems like only yesterday” that Disneyland had announced plans to open a third theme park — all during the time when Disney’s California Adventure was still under construction. They set up a teaser website which gave us a look at what the re-development of the area around Disneyland could look like. It also mentioned some of the types of attractions that could be added to the third park.
With recent talk of “Disneyland Forward,” this probably explains the interest in this post about something from over 20 years ago.
I grew up in the 1970s visiting Disneyland and Walt Disney World with my family. Although I had visited Universal Studios Florida as a teenage (during its first year or so of being open), most of our time was spent at Disney. I only visited Universal a few times until I got my first Universal annual pass a few years ago. I also had never stayed at an on-site resort hotel anywhere (well, I did stay at the Hersheypark Lodge once) until Universal.
My lack of experience with the park had me completely unaware that there was a beautiful walking path that connected all the hotels except Surfside/Dockside to Citywalk. I recall seeing them and trying to find information about them after a trip. Since I did not know the name “Garden Walk,” I could find nothing. After learning the game, I could find tons of videos and references to them…but no maps.
So I made a map. The map has layers that can be turned on showing locations of the water taxi docks, the walking paths, security checkpoints and such. It’s surprising how walking from a resort to the front of a theme park via Garden Walk can be LESS WALKING that walking to the bus stop and taking the bus where it drops you off at the far end of CityWalk.
With tongue firmly planted in cheek, this one goes back to things my father was told during visits to Walt Disney World in the 1970s — back when the only theme park there was Magic Kingdom. He had heard they build the Contemporary Resort to have a casino… A casino associated with Disney was quite a shocking idea back then, but in recent years, the topic actually has come up about Disney having casinos.
Well, I never thought we’d see alcohol at Disneyland or Magic Kingdom, or beer kegs at ice cream carts, so who knows. Modern Disney is very different.
I bought my first digital camera in 1996, and began taking pictures at theme and amusement parks. I visited Universal Studios Florida the year before Islands of Adventure opened, and then the first year the new park opened. I have a few photos taken at the preview center that was were the New York tribute store and Mummy lockers are today.
I suspect interest in the upcoming (hopefully) Epic Universe tribute store is why this article has been getting views.
There was a time when FastPass was new. There is alot of conflicting information on when and where it started, but this was the first time I got to use it.
I was practicing click-bait. Discussions come up from time to time about how folks swear the original song had the word “rape” in it. Until the modern internet, where lyrics and downloadable songs became a thing, I too had memories of that word being in the song and how out-of-place it seemed.
But history shows this was never the case.
But there have been times when the song was presented in edited form 😉 Click the bait to find out more.
Although I had visited Disneyland in the 1970s — I remember being there before Space Mountain and before Big Thunder Mountain — I did not start going as an adult until 1995. By 1996, I was visiting with a digital camera. I put together some of the photos of what the park was like before Disney’s California Adventure was announced and construction began.
When I got my first digital camera in 1996, I never could have imagined there would be a time when I’d be updating photo galleries with over 150,000 photos in them. Initially, all my theme park photos were able to fit in one master “DisneyFans Photos” gallery. Today, the number of files in that gallery far exceed what my web host account can allow. Because of that, I had to split the gallery up in to multiple accounts – Disneyland, Disney World and non-Disney Theme Parks.
Due to how much time it takes to update the non-Disney gallery each time I return from Universal and SeaWorld (due to having to go through all the other theme park photos), I am finally going to split off Universal Studios (Hollywood and Orlando) and SeaWorld in to their own sub-gallery.
This will group photos as follows:
Disneyland
Walt Disney World
Universal Studios & SeaWorld
…other Theme Parks
I am in the process up creating the new US/SW gallery (over 31,000 photos just from those parks) and will begin uploading it later tonight. I will then redo the Theme Parks gallery to remove Universal and SeaWorld. Hopefully folks will find them at their new location.
As one of the longest running theme park sites on the Internet (from my pre-domain days back in 1996, to the DisneyFans.com days and now this site), I hate to make big changes like this. Apologies in advance for the links that will be broken…
