Disney has lots of unofficial days in the park. I almost never go to these because they are on weekends and I rarely go to Disneyland on a weekend. I have gone to Pin-Up Day once but I haven’t gone back to it since. But of all the unofficial days, Dapper Day is the biggest one for sure. I had never been to the park during Dapper Day and never really had a plan to, but when my Disney friend Michelle asked me if I wanted to go I decided to check it out.
Dapper Day is a day when lots of people go to the park dressed up like they would have dressed when Disneyland opened in 1955. I don’t have a lot of outfits that would fit that idea, but I tried to pull something together that looked a bit more vintage than my usual outfits.
Michelle has a ton of vintage outfits so she had a super cute dress on but I didn’t end up getting a photo of us together. But there is a good reason for that.
We had a bit of a later start getting to Disneyland. I had my brunch in the morning and I headed straight to Michelle’s place and got there around 12:45pm. We were in the car quickly and there wasn’t a ton of traffic getting to Disneyland. We were at the exit for Disneyland in about 45 minutes and saw a line of cars trying to exit. We knew the day would be crowded so seeing a line of cars didn’t surprise us too much. We figured it would move quickly and we would be parking soon.
Then we noticed that we just weren’t moving. 30 minutes passed. An hour passed. And we still weren’t off the freeway. The flyover from the freeway exit to the parking lot was closed so we thought maybe it had to do with cars trying to get through the traffic light. But that didn’t explain it enough. We finally started to get closer to the parking lot entrance, and we noticed some cop cars and an ambulance going by. I still don’t know why they were there, but we were not allowed to go into the parking lot and were being redirected to park at the convention center.
Even once we were on Disney property trying to drive over to the convention center, the traffic was still unbearable. It had been about 3 hours after we got to the freeway exit and it didn’t seem like anything was getting better. And after being in the car for so long, both of us desperately needed to find a bathroom. We were terrified it would take another 2 hours to park, so when we saw the street to the Grand Californian Hotel, we turned and begged them to let us park the car so we could run into the lobby to use the bathroom. Fortunately, they let us do that and then we got back into the car to try to figure out how to get to a parking lot.
Because of how the exit from the hotel went, we couldn’t continue going toward the convention center. And it was so weird because the endless traffic jam that we were caught in was gone and there were no cars on that side of the street. We drove back toward the entrance that we came in and discovered the parking lot was open again! We had to drive a little bit of a loop, but we managed to finally park the car in the parking lot that we attempted to get to about 4.5 hours earlier.
I know that Disney did their best for the crowds that they were dealing with and they may have been a medical emergency that was causing more issues, but we were both feeling a little bit fed up once we were out of the car. Instead of heading straight into the park to see everyone in their Dapper Day outfits, we went to the Mexican restaurant in Downtown Disney to decompress and try to get into a better mood. Fortunately, margaritas and chips helped us and we were in a slightly better mood when we finally headed over to Disneyland.
By the time we were in the park, it was getting close to 6pm and we were already exhausted. But we wanted to try for at least a few rides and we were thinking about trying to stay for the fireworks. Our first ride was Pirates of the Caribbean because it was the last day before the ride went down for a refurbishment. They are changing the bride auction scene and are turning the redhead from that scene into a pirate. So we had to say our goodbye to the redhead.
The ride was as good as it always was and while I love the ride as it is I’m excited to see the changes when it reopens.
After Pirates, we went on the Haunted Mansion since it was located in the same area of the park. We were checking out some of the fun outfits that people were wearing for Dapper Day, but I think both Michelle and I were just kind of feeling done with the day. The long wait in the car while trying to park kind of wore us down and we never recovered from it. So after the Haunted Mansion, we were back on the tram to take us to the parking lot.
We did figure out that technically we were at the park a little bit longer than we spent in the car trying to park, but it’s sad that it was only maybe a 20 minute difference. When we were stuck in the car, we had talked about just giving up and going home, but we were stuck where we couldn’t turn around. I’m glad we didn’t go home and we did manage to get on a few rides, but it was not the best first time going to Dapper Day. If I go again in the future, I’ll make sure I try to get there around the time the park opens so hopefully there won’t be the same parking issue. But to be honest, I’m just happy to go on my random Mondays and don’t know if going on the unofficial days is really my thing.
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