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An R-Rated Guide to Disneyland

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​One of the perks of living in Southern California is vacationing from your everyday life anytime you’ve got the itch. You can go to the beach, trek up a mountain, explore the desert, or literally escape to a world of pure fantasy that was created specifically to delight you.

Disneyland in Anaheim is a short drive from Los Angeles, and a portal to a strange utopia where you can experience life like a child, even if you don’t bring a child with you. In fact, don’t bring a child with you. You’re now an adult who can do whatever you want, and this makes Disneyland a very different and wonderful place. Gather your best friends, skip out of work, and head down to the Happiest Place on Earth to have a very adult time.

GEAR UP AND GO ON A WEEKDAY

If you absolutely hate lines and crowds, check Is It Packed before making Disneyland plans. The best days to go are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and if you can wait until the crowd prediction is ‘Ghost Town’ you’ll have the best chance for very short wait times.

Insider Tip: The Disneyland app will give you real-time updates of wait times for all attractions so you can better plan your day.

GETTING THERE

downtown disney

Driving to Disneyland is not too bad, but parking can be an expensive nightmare. Get an Annual Pass if possible, so you can make your trips as short or as long as you’d like without activating your Fear Of Missing Out. If you’ll be there for a short time, park at Downtown Disney. Does Disney hate it when you park at Downtown Disney to go to the parks? Yes. But will you spend some time at Downtown Disney before and after? Probably. Live in the gray areas! Just read their parking rules before you go so you know whether this will be cheaper or more expensive for the kind of day you’re planning.

You can also take the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner down from Union Station in Downtown LA, which is a beautiful train ride. There’s a shuttle that goes directly to the park, and the new Anaheim Station is a pretty cool building.

Your first stop before entering the park should always be Trader Sam’s Enchanted Tiki Bar at the Disneyland Hotel. This is a short walk from Downtown Disney, and a pretty excellent spot to prepare for your adventures. Depending on the drinks being ordered, there are special effects that happen throughout the bar. The lights dim, volcanoes go off, bowls full of rum are re-filled and sometimes it even rains in there.

tiki

After a drink or two, make the short walk to Downtown Disney and with your Annual Pass you can jump straight onto the tram that takes you to Tomorrowland. No lines! No gates! And if you ask nicely, you can get to ride in the front car of the train—which, by the way, is the oldest monorail in the world.

Once in Tomorrowland, check your app for wait times. (I’m a huge Space Mountain fan, so I get a FastPass before riding anything else to ensure my peace of mind.) With your favorite FastPass secured, it’s time to mill about the rest of the park. Right off the tram, Buzz Lightyear is a fun way to get competitive and it never has any wait time at all. I’m a horrible loser and an even worse winner, so Buzz Lightyear really helps me alienate all my friends.

WHICH RIDES?

pirates

Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean have very fast-moving lines that are cool and shady if it’s sunny, or you can ride Indiana Jones as a Single Rider to skip the line and the sunshine completely. You might not get to sit with your friends, but you’re not a kid, so you don’t care. Winnie the Pooh is a psychedelic winner of a ride. And if it’s melting hot out there, you can put your electronics in a free locker by Splash Mountain, get soaking wet, and go get a Dole Whip at the Enchanted Tiki Room in Adventureland. This is like the PG version of the bar you started out at, and it has a beautiful variety of animatronic birds who sing slightly culturally uncomfortable songs.

carthay

After spending some time at Carthay, go ride Soarin’ Around the World over and over, as many times as possible if there is no line. If you ask nicely, they’ll let you sit in the first row dead center, so you really get the full effect of being a time and space-traveling hang glider.

Insider Tip: I take my shoes off when riding this ride, which is a contagious thing to do. When people see you take your shoes off, they do it too. It’s weird. Don’t question it.

racers

The last stop of the day is a quick Single Rider jaunt through Radiator Springs Racers in Cars Land. And then what? Whatever you want! You’re an adult! At this point you might be pretty tired and cranky, but if you’re not a huge baby you might want to go ride all the rest of the rides and attend the nightly parade which is pretty excellent, and might make you cry. (I have a weird thing where crowds doing things together make me cry without fail. It’s just so beautiful.)

POST-DISNEY

Remember how you parked at Downtown Disney? A great way to get your parking mostly validated is to go see a movie at the AMC. It’s also a good way to make sure you’re 100% sober by the time you get on the road. Sometimes, if you go to a late showing, all the parking attendants have left by the time the movie’s over and you can just drive out of the lot like an absolute winner.

If you’re hungry for dinner, there are a lot of good options around the park or a short ride away, such as The Packing House, which is essentially a fun, fancy food court. Or, on the drive back up to Los Angeles, you could stop at Chicago chain masterpiece Portillo’s Hot Dogs and get a sausage with peppers and a chocolate shake. They have a chocolate shake that features an entire slice of chocolate cake in it. You walked a lot today, right?

If you’re super tired and the drive is looking too long, skip the Disneyland Hotels and stay at a classic favorite like the Alpine Inn, which is straight out of the 50’s and made to look like a snowed-in cabin. It’s a walk away, has free parking and faces the backside of Cars Land. As beautiful as the Grand Californian is, you really only need a place to sleep and dream about all the delightful things you’ve done as an adult in the magical world of Disneyland.

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The Luxurious Way to Experience Tokyo’s Cherry Blossom Season

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Palace Hotel Tokyo’s Blossoming Tokyo package immerses guests in the beautiful cherry blossoms that bloom throughout the city during the spring months. Over the course of a three-hour tour, guests will be chauffeured to Tokyo’s most scenic sakura-spotting locales in a luxury car.

Interested in taking your Instagram to the next level? The hotel’s concierge can, at an additional charge, arrange for a professional to photograph guests among the blossoms. No filters necessary!

The package (which features additional add-ons such as a workshop on mochi making, a lesson on the art of flower arranging, as well as a seasonal bento box lunch tasting) is available from March 1 through May 31.

To learn more about the Blossoming Tokyo package visit Palace Hotel Tokyo.

PLAN YOUR VISIT with the Tokyo Travel Guide.

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Travel Tips

Today Is National Plan for Vacation Day!

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Today marks the first-ever “National Plan for Vacation Day,” created by the organization Project: Time Off, which estimates that 55 percent of employees in America do not use all of their allotted vacation days.

In fact, Americans skipped out on 658 million days in 2015, many of which couldn’t be recouped the next year because they didn’t roll over. What’s the reasoning behind the overzealous work ethic?

For one, employees are glued to their computers and phones, available at all times, and able to work anywhere that has Wi-Fi. We also have fears associated with taking time off: work will pile up while we’re away, or employers will see us as replaceable.

And some of us are bad at planning—by the time we get around to thinking about vacation, our calendar has already filled up for the year. Making time is worth it, though; as it turns out, vacations are actually quite good for employees and have benefits similar to meditation. Many employees found their own concentration had improved and were able to get more done after returning from vacation.

It’s still early days for 2017, so Project: Time Off is urging employees to work out a schedule today, so you can make sure that PTO doesn’t go to waste, even if it means having a conversation with your boss.

Now, the fun part: where should you go with your pent-up wanderlust? Our staff recommends places like Bordeaux, Cape Town, and Kiev, (but maybe skip Dubai and Times Square).

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Travel Tips

Test Drive Google’s Totally Amazing Arts and Culture App

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Picture yourself standing within inches of Chagall’s magnificent ceiling at the Paris Opéra, examining every last detailed brushstroke of the surrealist masterpiece. Or strolling through the back streets of Paris in the company of urban explorer and photographer David de Rueda. This is the stuff art dreams are made of, experiences that only the luckiest of art aficionados may have the chance to enjoy—if they’re really, really lucky.

But thanks to a new Google online platform, you don’t even need to leave your home to relish in some of the world’s most amazing art. Since not everyone has the time or money to travel the world appreciating global culture or the connections to access such masterpieces, the Google Cultural Institute has partnered with more than 1,100 institutions, making available more than 400,000 artworks and 5 million photos, videos, manuscripts and other documents online, to everyone, for free. And not just make available, but curated with virtual tours, online exhibitions, a searchable database, and a bounty of other ways to experience the world’s foremost cultural treasures. It’s a platform called Google Arts & Culture, available via website and app.

Admittedly, the site is a little confusing to navigate. The best thing to do is just play and see what you discover. You will be rewarded wherever you end up. The homepage changes daily with different features, while the hamburger menu provides navigation to artists, art movements, partner institutions, and the like.

Here’s a primer on the absolutely-do-not-miss highlights.

Explore a Database of Artworks

Frida

You can sort through thousands of masterpieces from thousands of museums in more than 70 different countries. Use the search tool to search for anything: shoes, all things silver, Egyptian cats, Bordeaux, whatever you choose. You also can search by artist, medium, art movement, museum (search by partner), even object. Or scroll through an artist’s repertoire by time period (for example, see Rembrandt’s evolution as an artist, one painting at a time, here) or color (see here).

Zoom in to See Masterpiece Secrets

Google has devised advanced technology to hone into the extraordinary detail of images, paintings, artifacts and more, far beyond what you can see with the naked eye. One of the most amazing stories concerns Paris Opéra’s ceiling by Marc Chagall. Chagall’s son, David McNeil, had always heard that his father had painted a picture of him as a baby but he never knew where it was – until they found it embedded in the Paris Opéra ceiling, near the Stravinsky panel, during this Google project. Take a peek here.

Take a Virtual Tour

Castle

Get up close and personal to hundreds of art institutions and cultural icons—the Statue of Liberty, Sagrada Familia, Fenway Park—where you can drag your finger around the image and tap to move through an exhibit or location in a museum-themed version of Google Street View. It’s like you’re personally visiting the site, studying what’s on the walls, on the floor, in the next room, whatever interests you, without actually being there. And it’s not just big museums here–check out, for example, the Wyeth-Tootle Mansion in St. Joseph, Missouri. Some also require the use of a virtual reality viewer to enhance the experience (such as Google Cardboard; the website shows you how to make your own; see here).

See Secret Spaces in 360

Join urban explorer and photographer David de Rueda in an exploration of Paris’ secret side in a feature called Curio-Cité, best seen on your mobile phone with a virtual reality viewer and headphones. This is just the first of many such explorations to be created.

Get Good Old-Fashioned Museum Info

MOMA

Should you be planning to physically visit a museum, you can check opening hours, its location on a map, and daily events.

Enjoy an Interactive Online Exhibit

Google offers a series of different online exhibits in which you can delve into archival materials, objects, and stories typically not available to the typical museum visitor. There are straightforward museum visits as well as curated exhibits centering on various themes. The American Democracy collection, for example, brings together more than 70 exhibits and 2,500 artifacts from 44 institutions dedicated to the preservation of U.S. political history and American democracy. Take a peek here. That said, the behind-the-scenes tour of London’s Natural History tank room, curated by Oliver Crimmen, the museum’s Senior Curator of Fish, has to be one of the more unusual tours you’ll find. Among the things he’ll show you are specimens collected by Charles Darwin during his voyage aboard the H.M.S. Beagle.

Read Fascinating New Stories About Art Every Day

Daily

Google experts post featured new stories every day, offering insight (and photos) into different angles of art and culture. Recent ones include: “Weird Histories: The Peacock Room,” exploring the history of Whistler’s beautiful London dining room, currently at home in Washington’s Freer Gallery; ”Virtual Herbal Garden,” taking you to the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences; and “Black and British: A Forgotten History,” a four-part series delving into Britain’s slave narrative. As you will see, these are not light and fluffy fillers!

Enhance a Personal Visit

If you find yourself taking a physical tour of a museum, check out a new feature that several museums are offering through Google Arts & Culture. With Art Recognizer, you point your phone at a painting to access a bounty of info about it. For now, this is available only at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales, and London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery. But Google is planning to roll this out in museums around the world, so stay tuned.

There’s Much, Much More

Yangzhou

Just play around with the website and you’ll come across all kinds of fascinating offerings. The folks at Google are constantly innovating–there’s even a page that shows their experiments at the crossroads of art and technology. You can bet this site will continue to be massaged and improved upon and enlarged. Stay tuned!

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