In the mixtures of closure and quarantine and only bad news surrounding Disney, I figured I'd lighten things up a bit (as much for myself as you all) with a trip report from our one day visit to Hollywood Studios a few weeks ago. Back when the world was still semi-normal. This is going to be long because wtf else am I going to do while sitting around?
As a bit of background we are a family of four with a 5 year old son who absolutely LOVES Star Wars and a 3 year old daughter who loves Frozen and thrills.
We arrived at the parking pay booth at around 7am for an 8am opening. Our goal was to get a spot in the virtual queue for RoR and to sign my son up for the Jedi Academy show. At 7am there was already a long line at parking, and it took a good amount of time to get through it. By the time we paid, parked, and walked over to the park with two small kids and a grandma in tow then got through the bag check line it was about 7:52am when we got in line to scan our tickets and we were sweating. There were only 5 people in front of us but 3 of them had problems with their magic band and couldn't get it to scan. Ultimately we got through at literally 7:59am just in time to do the virtual queue thingy for RoR.
PROTIP (skip this paragraph if you don't care about virtual queueing): One thing a lot of the guides leave out in the RoR planning is that when you click the button to join the virtual queue by default it selects ALL USERS linked with your My Disney account as part of your group, not just the ones that have a ticket. That means if you've had people in your My Disney group before that aren't with you on that day it will select them for your virtual queue group and then throw an error when you try to join because they don't have tickets. It cost me an extra 10 seconds to go through and unselect them which doesn't sound like much but it was the difference between the people next to me getting boarding group 20 and me getting boarding group 57 (just outside of the guaranteed range and technically on the standby list). So the pro-tip here is to remove everyone linked to your Disney account that is not part of your group on that day so you don't have to spend an extra 10 seconds choosing which people are a part of your group when inside the virtual queue section. I can't believe none of the guides mentioned this.
From there we made a bee-line to the Jedi Academy sign-up. 3 shows were already full but we signed up for the noon show.
After the 10 minutes that took, every big ride was pretty much full to the brim. RoR virtual queueing means the usual show up early and ride without lines strategy doesn't work here. In fact it's the opposite as the park is busiest right on open so the busiest lines are right off the bat. Slinky, Smuggler's Run, etc were all 120+ minute waits already. So instead we did a few laps on the old Star Tours which my Star Wars loving son thought was pretty much the coolest thing ever.
After that we did a quick Olaf meetup for our 3 year old and then headed over to Galaxy's Edge to explore and build a droid.
My first thoughts on Galaxy's Edge itself are kind of 'meh'. I read a lot of reviews that mentioned how interesting just walking around the area is so I budgeted time for it. They mostly make mention of the cool details, sounds, character interactions. etc. The problem is these things are a lot more difficult to notice with 80 bajillion people walking around. Same with the character interactions as there are so many people that the characters get lost in there, although we did manage to corner Rey at one point and my daughter
had a pretty cool interaction with her. But stuff like we were excited about getting my son to interact with the storm troopers (he was wearing a Darth Vader costume) but the storm trooper actors were just too overwhelmed all day.
At 10:30 we went to our droid building appointment. Note that it is only one adult per child building which makes sense because it's crowded in there. I didn't realize there was a standby option availabe but with our appointment we were able to skip the line and go right in to wait in the other lines. All in all it took about an hour to move through all the queues but it was way worth it. My son had been excited to do this for a long time and he loved it. They have one small area where you can
play with the droid out front but other than that they have to stay boxed up the rest of the day. We bought a personality chip because we heard the droids then react differently to things within the land, which is a cool idea and I'm sure was great for the people that got to early review it without real crowds, but again there were so many people there that you literally couldn't hear the droid at all while walking around so it was pretty useless. Ultimately we ditched the box and loaded the droid into an empty backpack we had brought to save the $49 backpack fee. This was one of our best moves as the $49 backpack honestly looks terrible and the box the droid goes into is huge and a major pain in the ### to carry around. So another PROTIP, bring an empty backpack to put your droid into.
PROTIP #2 on the droids here, my son built a BB unit which is very cool but it's worth noting that, and again I don't know why this was mentioned in any of the reviews, in order to turn the unit on/off or wake it from standby mode you have to COMPLETELY DISASSEMBLE IT EVERY TIME. This isn't the end of the world and doesn't take long but opening the main compartment requires some muscle and isn't something a 5 year old can do on their own. So I get like 3 calls into my son's room every day to help him wake his droid up from sleep mode.
By then it was time to head over to get ready for the Jedi Academy show for my son as they were clear that if we weren't 30 minutes early they would give our spot away to someone else. This was the highlight of the trip for us. The 20 or so kids
wear jedi robes, get marched through the park to the stage, get trained how to use a lightsaber, and then ultimately get to fight either Darth Vader or Kylo Ren depending on which group they are in. They make a big deal introducing Vader/Ren and the Jedi Master then asks who is brave enough to be the first to fight Darth Vader. This proud papa was over the moon when my normally very cautious/shy son jumped up and shot his hand into the air to volunteer before anyone else. Then he
kicked Darth Vader's ###.
This was pretty much the highlight of my son's year and I think this gets looked over a lot. If your kid loves Star Wars, he will freaking love this.
We then hit lunch at Hollywood and Vine. We weren't on a dining plan so the price was pretty steep for what it was. It was fine but our group of 5 came out to like $350 after tip and it definitely wasn't a $350 meal, but whatever it's Disney it was a nice break. From there we headed to the Frozen show which was great and my daughter freaking loved. Another underrated attraction if you have a Frozen loving family member and even my son was really enjoying it. Lots of good humor as well for the adults.
RoR must have been running pretty smoothly because our boarding group got called at this point. Apparently we were enough to jinx that because when we arrived they told us it had just broken down. They told us at this point we could just come back at any time when it was up and running again even if it was past our boarding group.
We saw it back up and running again later and headed back but it was broken down again. We decided to wait this time and it was up and running again soon which ended up being perfect because normally there is still a line (usually about an hour long, apparently) even after your boarding group is called which was much shorter now. Another PROTIP here, our 3 year old wasn't big enough for the ride so we got to use rider swap for her. Unlike other rider swaps where you still wait in the regular line they then let us go through the fastpass line (for both our 1st ride and our 2nd rider swapped line). Since there is no actual fastpass for the ride yet that is literally a trip straight to the ride with no waiting.
The ride was OK, pretty cool overall but not the world changer I'd heard about. One cool thing was because the ride had just re-opened and there was no one in front of us, this SIGNIFICANTLY increased the realism factor as there were no lines in front of us. The 2nd time through when everything was filled back up it felt much more like a Disney ride when we were walking through the ship, etc. Compared to the 1st time where it was just us in the empty ship with the resistance guards giving us their full attention.
Anyway on the main part of the ride my wife and I might have oversold the realism factor to our a son a little too much. We realized this when, as he clung to my arm he asked me "daddy, are we really going to die?". At that point we abandoned the show and told him it was just a ride and everything was safe and he calmed down.
After two rides on that it was Toy Story Land for our Slinky Dog fastpass. Our 3 year old is a daredevil and this was her first rollercoaster and she did not disappoint. Not an ounce of fear in her body,
she giggled with shear delight the entire ride.
From there we made the rounds on some older rides we could walk onto until it got late. Just before close the Smuggler's Run line got down within 35 minutes or so and we finally got a chance to hit that. Very fun ride that again my son loved though it was odd the height requirement was only 38" when our 38" daughter couldn't reach any of the buttons on the ride. Regardless we were glad we could all go together and my son got a kick out of being inside the Millennium Falcon and still brags to this day that he shot downmore bad guys than his sister. Weeks later it's still "Hey dad remember at Star Wars land, I can't believe Ashley only shot down THREE bad guys! That's crazy I shot down so many.".
That was it for the rides as they were all closed and things were emptying out. It was nice to have even a few minutes
in an emptied out Galaxy's Edge before the park workers started funneling us towards the park entrance.
Our plan at this point was to leave and beat the crowds but of course when my son got wind of a Star Wars themed fireworks show we had one last thing to do. The show was honestly pretty crappy. Barely any fireworks, it was really basically just an (honestly pretty bad) Star Wars tribute/trailer up on a big screen with a few poorly timed sparklers going off every once in a while. But my 5 year old thought it was cool so whatever, was worth braving the crowds on the way out for that I guess.
In the end it was every bit the magical Disney experience they sell in the commercials. Both the kids had the time of their lives and can't stop talking about it.
One last quick PROTIP for our 5 year old instead of doing the crazy $200 (albeit really cool) lightsabers we just had him do the old lightsaber building that's been around for years. The sabers are much crappier and don't even make noise but it was $30 bucks and collapses down to small size for easy travel and my 5 year old still thinks it's pretty much the coolest thing ever.