Today at Disney California Adventure: Lunar New Year

I headed out to Disney California Adventure this afternoon to take in the Lunar New Year celebration ahead of a rainstorm expected on Sunday.

No sign of rain today!

As usual, the Paradise Gardens decorations for the Lunar New Year were eye-catching:

We really enjoyed these talented dragon dancers!

It was announced today that Disney is raising prices -- no big surprise, as they go up every year, but the amount the Premium pass was increased was a bit of a gulp.

The bigger news is Disney is said to be discontinuing selling parking passes to all but Premium passholders or current passholders who already have parking and will be allowed to continue to purchase it when they renew. Charging passholders parking on each visit seems pretty crazy, as one visit per month would add a couple hundred dollars to the cost of a pass -- it seems like a backdoor way to try to reduce the number of visits passholders make. It also seems aimed at trying to influence passholders to commit to full day trips, to get their money's worth from the parking fee, instead of "dropping in," as I did today.

It will be interesting to see if the lack of parking pass availability depresses future sales or, conversely, leads to the sale of more Premium passes.

Given the continuing increases, it would certainly be nice to see Disney invest some of that money in additional ride capacity for each park!

Meanwhile, Luigi's Tires is now closed until 2016, when a new ride will be unveiled:

Previous Lunar New Year photos: 2013 and 2014.