My family is crazy. No, I don’t mean mentally(although there may be a little of that). I mean we are crazy when it comes to travel. We are the kind of people who will try to fit as much into a trip as possible. If we have a long layover, we will leave the airport and go travel around the city. If we see cheap flights online, we will figure out a way to make that trip fit into our schedule. If there is a way to add a leg to our trip, we will do so. Basically, we try to cram as much into each trip as possible. We kind of like our crazy travel aspects. In my dad’s words, “We don’t go on vacations, we go on trips.” Two years ago, I think we did the craziest thing yet. We went to Shanghai and Hong Kong, China for the week of spring break.
We are huge Disney fans. We love Disney movies, Disney parks, and really just everything Disney. Two and a half years ago a new Disney park opened in Shanghai, China. It was supposed to have amazing rides, be huge, and really just be above and beyond any other Disney park that had previously been opened. Until that park opened, my parents and I had been to every Disney park in the world. So, when Shanghai Disneyland opened, we knew we had to go. We didn’t have any plans to travel to Asia anytime soon, so my parents started randomly checking Sky Scannerーa website where you can find cheap flights. In March of 2017 they found super cheap tickets to Shanghai from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. My parents started thinking, and they decided that this would be a great spring break trip. This is when the adventure started.
Let me tell you, it is not very easy to travel to China. You need to have a Chinese Visa. Well, none of us had one. My mom started researching online and found out that there was a way to go to Shanghai without a Visa. You just had to show that your time in Shanghai was basically a layover. So, you had to have a direct flight from the US to Shanghai, you couldn’t be in Shanghai for more than 144 hours,(trust me, they check with you before you leave the airport) and you had to be traveling to another country from Shanghai. Well, we thought that this might work, but we didn’t know what other country to travel to. I mean we could go almost anywhere in Asia, but a week isn’t that long, so it needed to be somewhere close. We started looking online again and found other cheap flights to Hong Kong, which, although it is technically part of China, counts as a “different country” for this 144-hour Visa. I know this may seem like a really random place for us to travel to for the second part of our trip, but they, too, had a Disney park that we wanted to visit.
Once we had figured out all of the travel aspects, my parents decided that this wasn’t just an idea for a spring break tripーthis was going to be OUR spring break adventure.
This was a super last-minute trip, so we had about a week to pack and plan all that we were going to do. Thankfully, we were able to get everything that we needed to do done by the time spring break came around. That Saturday we left for China.
The flight was about 13 hours long, but that was going to be the easy part of the travel to Shanghai. Once we got there, that was when we got nervous. In order to qualify for the 144-hour Visa, you had to have a lot of printed paperwork, and I mean A LOT of paperwork. You needed to have a document showing exactly how many hours you would be in Shanghai, you had to have proof that you would be leaving to go to a different country after your 144 hours were up, and you had to have a printed copy of your hotel reservations for while you were in Shanghai.
Let me tell you, when you are standing there in line, waiting for it to be your turn at border control, it’s kind of terrifying. You start to wonder if you will be the person that messed some portion of the paperwork up and ends up being arrested and put in jail. I know this seems kind of crazy, but, I mean, it’s China so you never know. After an hour and a half of waiting and talking to border control, we learned that we, in fact, did have everything done perfectly and we got to go into Shanghai.
When we got to Shanghai Disneyland, we were in awe. We were staying at the Toy Story Hotel and the theming was amazing! There were all these little details that we loved. From looking like you were walking into a toy box at the front entrance to having big “marbles” at the front desk, it was just all so cool.
We then went into the park and were even more amazed. The park was HUGE! The singular Disneyland park is three-times as big as Epcot, which, if you’ve ever been there, you know is huge. There are a few rides that Shanghai Disneyland has that are unique to there and we couldn’t wait to ride them. They had rides like TRON Lightcycle Power Run, Pirates of the Carribbean: Battle for Sunken Treasure, and Buzz Lightyear Planet Rescue. We knew that we needed to go to these special attractions first, and boy were we impressed when we rode each one of them.
Overall our trip was really amazing! We got to ride all of the new rides AND we got to say that we had been to every Disney park in the world again. I know we may seem crazy because we chose to go through a 12-hour time change in just a week, but looking back, I am so glad we decided to do that trip. Actually, I would do it over again anytime. It kind of feels like we did an impossible jet-lag challenge. Though, in Walt Disney’s words, “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”
Fantasyland Friends 