We just got back from our first trip to Disneyland in almost 2 years. We were there for four days and had a great time as a family. Because of the state of the world, there were some new and different rules that you had to follow while you were there. In today’s post I’m going to share some of those new things and give an overall update on our experience.

Masks

As of October 5th, when this post is going up, masks are required in Disneyland anytime you are inside of a building. This includes restaurants, restrooms, and any ride or attraction that is at lear partially indoors.

Since I knew we would be putting masks on and off many times a day and I knew I didn’t want to be in charge of everyone’s masks, I purchased these mask lanyards from Amazon. They were so great to just clip your mask onto and wear around your neck. That way it was always ready to put on. Lucy was able to keep her lanyard on all day for the entire four days we were there and never had any trouble with it coming off. The only thing about these is that they are cheap, so the clips to clip your mask on and off (which we did every night to replace our masks for the next day) are really small  and thin. The first couple of times it was kind of tricky to clip the masks ons, but once the clips got broken in it was much easier.

Food

Most food in the park can be purchased via mobile ordering in the Disneyland app. We LOVE using mobile ordering. It makes it so much easier to figure out what you want, know how much it is going to cost, and schedule it for when you’re ready to eat. A few restaurants and quick service locations only have walk-up ordering or have walk-up ordering in addition to mobile ordering so that is still an option. But all of the food we ordered, except for churros, was done via the app.

We never had trouble ordering and we were always able to get a window within 20 or 30 minutes of when we ordered and often there were times right away as well. Earlier this summer mobile ordering times seemed to be really hard to come by and people were needing to make orders first thing in the morning if they wanted food. But Disneyland seems to have fixed that and we never had any trouble.

Lines

We were there the last week of September which is usually a less busy time of year. Our first day in Disneyland was quite busy, busier than we were expecting, but our other three days in the parks were not too bad. Lines for rides seemed fairly typical, even a little on the lower side most of the time. Larger rides like Radiator Springs Racers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Space Mountain often had 60+ minute wait times but sometimes they dropped to 20-30 minutes or less (except Radiator Springs Racers, the lowest time we saw for that one was 50 minutes).

For smaller rides, we never waited in line more than 20 or 30 minutes and even then that was rare for us to have to wait. Most lines were walk on or only a 10-15 minute wait.

Single rider lines were available some of the time for some of the rides. Due to staffing shortages there were often not enough staff to run the single rider lines for some of the rides. Often this was early in the morning or late in the evening.

Also there are currently no Fast Pass options. There were no Fast Passes given and all of the Fast Pass boxes have been taken out. Earlier this fall Disneyland announced that Genie and Genie+ will be coming out this fall. These are going to replace the Fast Pass and Max Pass systems as well as adding some additional features. When we were at Disneyland Genie and Genie+ were not available yet. They say that it will be available this fall but we did not see any new signage or anything that indicated it would be any time soon. My guess is it will be ready towards the end of November in time for the Christmas holiday rush.

Virtual Queues

There are currently virtual queues for one ride in each park: Star Wars Rise of the Resistance in Disneyland and Web Slingers: A Spiderman Adventure in California Adventure. To get in these virtual queues, you need to have a ticket to the park for that day and at 7:00 am you can go into your app and try to get a spot. If you’re not able to get a spot, the queues re-open at noon and you can try to get a spot for the afternoon or evening. We were able to get a morning spot for each ride on each day we were at the park. It seemed to work well for us and we didn’t have any trouble getting a reservation. Part of this was probably because we knew what we were doing and that there are less people in the parks.

Staffing

Like I mentioned earlier, there is a problem with not having enough staff to run Disneyland at its regular, full capacity. And you can definitely notice the lack of staff. Trash stays on the ground longer, restrooms are not as well maintained as usual, single rider lines are not always there, fewer people are there to work in restaurants so some of them are still closed, etc. While these staffing shortages didn’t have any major impact on our trip, they were noticeable and did kind of lessen some of the magic that we typical feel when we go to Disneyland.

Sum Up

Overall we had a good time at Disneyland and California Adventure. It was definitely different than our previous trips but we still had fun as a family and it was nice to be able to go when crowds were low. Our biggest takeaway was to make sure you know what to expect, follow the current guidelines and rules and you will have a good time.

Don’t forget if you’re planning on your own Disney vacation, use our link through Get Away Today to get the best deal on tickets and if you book a 3+ night vacation package, use our code YellowVan to save even more money.

**This post contains affiliate links**