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Grand Californian from Downtown Disney. | Grand Californian from California Adventure. |
We absolutely love this hotel. Probably the biggest reason is the proximity of the Grand Californian to both Disneyland and California Adventure. In fact, this hotel has its own private entrance into California Adventure, located very close to Grizzly River Run, and a very short walk to Soarin' over California. The rooms are large, and tastefully decorated, very comfortable. Mickey Mouse does not live here! The lobby is absolutely huge, with a wonderful seating area surrounding a very large fireplace. There are child -sized seats in this area, so children feel welcome around the fire.
We have stayed here two times now, once in a room overlooking Downtown Disney, and the second time overlooking Grizzly Peak in California Adventure. We were also able to see Paradise Pier. Both views were great, and allowed us to view some of the 'action' while staying in our room. The Grand Californian also has several great restaurants. Napa Rose is for fine dining, reservations required. Storyteller's is a character restaurant, where Chip and Dale can be found, but they do not come to the individual tables. Our favorite restaurant here is White Water Snacks. This is the place where you can get made to order cheeseburgers, and large serving of fries, other selections from the grill, coffee, juice, milk, and soda. The prices here are incredible! And I don't mean through the roof. The food is fresh, tastes great, and it is a non-crowded, quiet environment located near the pool at the Grand Californian
(Update from our June 2005 Trip)
We had another great stay at the Grand Californian Hotel. We had to have been in the farthest room from the lobby. The 1st day or so it seemed like we were walking so much to get to the elevators that we had lost the advantages of being in a hotel with its own entrance into Californian Adventure. Then we realized there was another bank of elevators pretty close to our room which took us right next to the entrance to Californian Adventure. Also… there were stairs right outside of our room that exited into Downtown Disney next to World of Disney which is pretty close to the security checkpoint into Disneyland. So the moral of the story is to determine were all the elevators/stairs are next to your room.
The Disney Resort Hotels now have high-speed internet connections. It worked pretty well but the 1st night I had problems. When trying to browse to a webpage the browser would just show a Disney Tinkerbell image. It turned out that at the bottom of this page off the screen was a button that had to be clicked to log onto the network. It took me a few hours to figure out that I needed to scroll down the page to logon. I did find out that the Grand Californian does have 24/7 technical support.