Thanksgiving Week at Disney - Part II

Since we had the 3-day park hopper passes, we could enter the park an hour earlier on Tuesday, so we got there by 7:30. 7:00 would have been too ambitious. We went straight to the Small World ride, which was decked out for the winter holidays. Suffice to say, there was no line. In the below photo, the few people standing next to the umbrella is the extent of the line.

Mathis trying to check out the scene on the Small World ride.
Since we were kids, the park has incorporated some favorite Disney characters into the ride.
The boat behind us only had one family.
Below you can see some of the holiday decor. You can compare this to the photo I took of this section the last time. https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1R3v_Bztv_zcumh3QGdJYjeUv6njeGk6r2LbfPa6ywCrxAM4YcmamrNbGkYZ7_KQ2LZfIiROb74UH7xwDeDRG1hTM4IiSgfx7JDP3OpMg0yhVtnnUIINVAeql1yjsXW_NQ4oBQ4QhY0Q2/s1600-h/20090624SmallWorldInside.bmp

We then headed over to New Orleans and Frontierland since we hadn't explored those areas much during our last trip in June. We took a log raft over to Tom Sawyer's Island, which was a lot of fun -- exploring a fort, bridges, treehouse, caves, and tunnels. I kind of freaked out at one point when Beck and Maile got separated at the caves and tunnels, and we couldn't find Beck.
We waited for a short while to see a Princess and the Frog parade and performance. They danced through New Orleans and then got on the Ferryboat and sang and danced from there. They even had the alligator character, Louis. Regular folks got to join in on the action. They wore costumes and waved props. They're holding the notes in the first photo and wearing yellow robes in the second.
In the afternoon, we went to California Adventure. The last time we went to California Adventure I missed the Bug's Life section because I was waiting in line for the Toy Story ride. So we took the kids there first. We went on one ride and then saw the 4D movie. I thought Beck would get scared during the movie since he didn't like a lot of the rides, but he was fine.

We then headed over to the studio lot area and saw the Playhouse Disney show. We saw Mulan the last time. For the show, they used puppets for the characters (vs using people), so they looked like they do on TV. But the puppets were kind of hard to see from the floor. The kids enjoyed it, esp. the bubbles and streamers.
California Adventure was also decorated for Christmas.
A couple of photos of Mathis from this day. The second we used on our holiday card.

That night we had dinner with Linda, an old Stanford friend. She's expecting a girl in late February (on my actual birthday but I don't want to make this about me :p ).