The 10 things I miss most about Disney California Adventure

Last Tuesday, the family went to Disney California Adventure as the first leg of our Southern California Resident ticket deal for this year*, and to celebrate my wife's birthday. Prior to the pandemic, we were Disneyland Annual Passholders, but the pandemic fucked everything (obviously) and made just about everything about going to the Disneyland Resort less pleasant and more onerous.

Things that have changed about Disneyland since COVID:

• Every pass other than walk-up tickets purchased onsite must have the dates reserved in advance, and those dates can fill up, which means you may not be able to actually go to Disneyland (or DCA) when you want to.
• Immediately after they reopened following the pandemic shutdown, they reverted to requiring Annual Passes be paid entirely upfront, which priced us out of them but also returned the park to its caste system that defined it until the advent of monthly payments, which introduced the Disney Social Clubs, which then led to the backlash to the Disney Social Clubs.
• They have since introduced a new "Magic Key" Annual Pass that allows monthly payments, but the cheapest tier blocks out everything but midweek, non-summer dates. You can't even book a date on a Saturday unless you pay for the highest tier available.
• The FastPass system is gone entirely. You can purchase an add-on to your ticket (per person) called Lightning Lane (that must be done entirely through the app of the person through whose account the tickets for your visit are linked, and woe to the large group that has to have multiple people with tickets on multiple apps) (also woe to the person who has to be designated app jockey all day, as my poor wife had to be last Tuesday), which allows you to book a return time for rides (if available; these return times also fill up – by the time we realized we had to get Lightning Lane for the day, around 10 am, the soonest Lightning Lane return time for Guardians of the Galaxy was 7:30 pm), but only one return time can be active at a time.
• The Lightning Lane doesn't include a couple of rides, like Radiator Springs Racers in DCA or Rise of the Resistance at Disneyland, and if you want a Fast Pass-type return time to skip the standby line, that's an additional single-ticket cost. Per person.
• Somehow, parking gets worse each time we go. In fairness, the new security area at the main parking structure now has extremely short waits for the tram from parking to the park, but actually waiting in line to pay for parking and get into the garage takes forever. Forever!

It was an extremely long day for all of us, and a five-year-old with ADHD at Disneyland was no picnic, but we still had a very good time. We may not technically be Disney Adults, but we do enjoy Disneyland and the Disney Parks a great deal.

The Disney parks are always changing. There's always some construction or new attraction or renovation happening somewhere. As such, DCA in particular has changed a LOT since I first started going there in 2007-ish. And there are a lot of attractions and features that I never went on or that I didn't even get to experience by then.

So here are my top 10 things that aren't at Disney California Adventure anymore, that I miss.

No. 10: People didn't used to go there, really

Yeah, this one is cheating, but DCA used to essentially be a ghost town much of the time, particularly in "Sunshine Plaza," pictured above, which has now been replaced by Buena Vista Street and Carthay Circle. You used to be able to saunter around DCA and not wait more than like 25 minutes for any ride not named Tower of Terror, and you could even score a FastPass for that at a reasonable time if you got there early enough.

No. 9: The old Entrance and Sunshine Plaza

The original concept for DCA was that it was literally a tour of the state of California, with all its different quirks and landmarks. It still is that to some degree, but the lands of the park in 2025 have a lot less specificity. It used to be that the different areas were literally "Hollywood," "San Francisco/Monterey," "The Redwoods," "The Boardwalk" (Santa Cruz or Santa Monica, take your pick), and so on. The San Francisco area is now "San Fransokyo" from Big Hero 6, the boardwalk is now the Pixar-themed Pixar Pier, the Redwoods area has partially been themed to the Wilderness Explorers from Up, and Cars' Cars Land/Radiator Springs has replaced A Bug's Land (which was DCA's previous stretch) – and Radiator Springs is canonically in Arizona!

But I did love the extreme jankiness of the old entrance and entrance area, which was really out of step with what Disney Parks were at the time, and was most reminiscent of the old live-performance area of Tomorrowland from the 1980s and early 1990s. When you walked in, you walked under a squished version of the Golden Gate Bridge (which the monorail used to pass through; it doesn't even go to DCA now), and then it opened up into a wide, wide plaza with a shitty little stage that would occasionally hold a Beach Boys cover band but would mostly be empty. It sucked and I loved it. They don't even have the "C A L I F O R N I A" letters out front anymore. RIP California.