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1. Soarin' Over California (in Disney's California Adventure)
This ride—the most compelling reason to shell out an extra $20 for a Park Hopper ticket—is a simulated hang-glider trip around the state. Inhale the piped-in orange-grove scent! Feel the vertigo! It's what an IMAX movie might be like if your local science museum invested several million dollars in mechanical seats that thrust you into the screen. Your eyes will convince you that there is nothing but air between you and Yosemite Valley, or Napa Valley, or the Golden Gate Bridge, hundreds of feet below. You will scream.
2. Indiana Jones Adventure
The line, an endless queue that snakes through a near-replica of the Bayon temple in Angkor Wat, may be more innovative than the ride itself, which at times resembles a trip down Broadway with a newly licensed cabbie at the wheel. And although the computer-controlled, bouncing, Humvee-like vehicles are supposedly capable of providing tens of thousands of distinct journeys through Indy Land, you'll need the sensibility of an Xbox pro to tell the difference between one trip and the next. But still, given the swarming spiders, abrupt drops, and profusion of Audio-Animatronic Harrison Fords, this is the most successful marriage of Disney style and thrill-ride jollies.
3. Splash Mountain
The first few times you climb into the floating logs on this flume ride, your attention may be rather too grimly focused on the singing and dancing reprise of 1 Fireworks inside the mountain—because you are dreading the almost vertical 57-foot drop that comes at the climax. The Theatre of Cruelty has nothing on this baby.
4. Space Mountain
Not just a speedy medium-size steel coaster—this is a speedy medium-size steel coaster in the dark and thus utterly terrifying, in spite of its relative mildness.
5. Matterhorn Bobsleds
Disneyland's 1959 replica of the famous Swiss peak is a support structure for the bobsled ride, the first steel coaster ever built. It's conquered at least once a day by Mickey, Minnie, and a mountaineer who looks like a lederhosen-wearing Godzilla on the 1:100-scale Alp.
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