Adventures By Disney Short Escape - Part 2

Day two of our Adventures By Disney short escape started with a character breakfast at Storytellers Cafe. When we met our guides at 7am they had tables ready for us and shortly after our plates were fixed characters were visiting us!

After breakfast we boarded a charter bus (a very nice one might I add!) and headed to Burbank for our first stop at the Walt Disney Studios! Talk about a bucket list item for us. I was in awe the entire time we toured the studios, just soaking every little detail in. We saw the recently dedicated Sherman Brothers stage, the original animation building, we walked the underground tunnel that connects the animation building to the ink and paint building, visited the Disney Archives where I was able to hold an Oscar that Walt won for White Wilderness, and visited the Disney Legends plaza located in front of the Team Disney building where the seven dwarfs overlook the plaza. All of this before lunch!!! Once our tour portion was over we were able to enjoy a little over an hour of free time where we hit up the Studios gift shop, and enjoyed lunch at the commissary.

After our visit to the Walt Disney Studios we headed to Disney Imagineering. I was able to take zero photos here. Seriously you can’t even pull your phone out, that place is on lock down!! But we had such a fun visit we saw models of Arendelle, virtually rode Shanghai’s Pirates of the Caribbean in “the dish”, saw ride concepts, and imagineers at work!

Dinner was next on the agenda, but our Adventure Guides surprised us with a visit to Griffith Park. Walt’s daughters would ride the carousel here and while Walt sat on a bench watching them enjoy the ride he started dreaming and creating Disneyland. The carousel was actually closed the day we visited, but the owner made a special trip and opened it just for our ABD group. He gave us a history of the carousel and then our group was able to ride on this almost 100 year old carousel! The carousel was built in 1926 and has been in Griffith Park since 1936. The carousel sports the original wooden horses, and was the inspiration for King Arthur’s Carousel at Disneyland. This added surprise was just the neatest piece of history to me, and it ended up being one of my favorite parts of the entire trip!

We ended our busy day with dinner at the Tam O’Shanter restaurant. This is the oldest operating restaurant in LA, and has been in business since 1922 in the same location run by the same family! The food was excellent! So how does this location tie in with our Adventures By Disney trip? Walt Disney frequently dined at Tam O’Shanters with his animators and imagineers. Walt always sat at table #31 during each visit, and the booth has since been dedicated to him.

After a wonderful dinner we headed back to the Grand Californian, and we choose to hit the parks! We closed California Adventure down and got approximately 4 hours of sleep before our very busy last day!

If you missed all of our Day 1 fun you can read about that here. Day 3 is over here. In the meantime if you have any questions about an Adventures By Disney vacation feel free to reach out :)