Mouse Ears & Sore Feet 🏰

Disneyland - The only place on earth where thousands of adults willingly stand in fenced cattle corrals for 90 minutes to experience a two-minute ride… then walk out smiling and immediately join another line.

Where people of every age happily wander around dressed as Snow White, Donald Duck, Darth Vader and Tinker Bell without a single person batting an eyelid.

There are honestly more strollers than human beings. Entire traffic jams caused by tiny people wearing mouse ears.

You can get sprinkled in fairy dust by a teenager working at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo Boutique. Although by about 4pm my feet hurt so much I was far too grumpy 😾 to be glittered ✨ by anyone.

A fridge magnet costs about $15. Lunch requires what feels like a small mortgage repayment. Popcorn 🍿 somehow smells permanently in the air, no matter where you are. The catering team must pop enough popcorn every day to feed an entire country.

And yet… there’s still something strangely magical 🧙🏻‍♀️ about it all.

We started at 8am and launched straight into the Indiana Jones ride, wandered through Star Wars, floated along on the Mark Twain Riverboat, climbed through Sleeping Beauty’s Castle 🏰 and went “hi-ho hi-ho” with the Seven Dwarfs.

Grown adults flying through the air on Dumbo elephants 🐘 Sitting in giant spinning teacups ☕️ Buying bubble 🫧 wands shaped like Ariel, Minnie and Cinderella while bubbles 🫧 float through Main Street like some kind of fever dream.

The entire day became one giant exercise in refreshing the Disneyland app trying to secure Lightning ⚡️ Lane bookings every two hours like it was the stock exchange.

Frontierland. Fantasyland. Main Street. New Orleans Square. Tomorrowland… which honestly should probably be renamed Yesterdayland because some of those rides feel gloriously frozen in 1955. But maybe that’s part of the charm too.

And then there’s the wonderfully awkward fact that Disneyland still contains so many things that probably shouldn’t survive a modern focus group. Cowboys and “Indians”, It’s a Small World 🌎 with giant smiling dolls representing entire countries in ways that feel wildly stuck in another era — Mexicans in sombreros, Chinese dolls in traditional hats, every stereotype imaginable cheerfully sailing past to an endlessly repetitive soundtrack.

And somehow… nobody even seems remotely bothered by it. Not in an angry way. More in a collective understanding that Disneyland exists in its own strange little nostalgic time capsule where the outside world’s arguments are temporarily suspended for a day.

We even saw the original bench where Walt Disney supposedly sat when the idea for Disneyland first came to him.

And standing there, amongst the chaos and screaming children and adults in matching family T-shirts, it did hit me what an extraordinary thing he created. A place that has made billions of dollars, yes… but also billions of memories across generations. Grandparents bringing grandchildren. Parents reliving childhoods. Couples returning decades later.

Then nighttime arrived and the whole park changed personality completely. The lights came on, castles glowed, music echoed through the streets, fireworks exploded overhead and suddenly the exhaustion faded for a little while. Disneyland at night feels softer. More nostalgic somehow.

It was crowded. Expensive. Overstimulating. My feet are absolutely destroyed.

But it was also fun 🤩 in a way that’s hard to properly explain unless you’ve been there.

And yet, walking out at the end of the night, I realised something quietly and without sadness — I think that was probably my last Disneyland visit.

Not because I didn’t enjoy it. I did.

But because it felt different this time. Like revisiting a place that belongs more to your memories than your future.

And honestly… that feels perfectly okay.Read more