"My Journey to Getting Gold on Sleeping Beauty's Castle in Disneyland -- a Mini-guide on Gilding Destination Gyms"

#PokemonGO: --== Intro ==--I just got back from a vacation to Disneyland with my wife and had the great pleasure of getting gold on Sleeping Beauty's Castle gym while there and I wanted to share my experience as I think my strategy will work on any major destination gym.​https://i.redd.it/s8li60louqj11.png​As the picture clearly shows, the strategy was essentially to feed a lot of berries in a VERY short period of time.In this post I will tell my story and also detail the strategy that I used to make it happen.​--== TL;DR ==--If you want the strategy without the story here you go ...- Save ~1700 berries including ~200-400 golden razz- Max out a Blissey (required)- Take the gym, place Blissey, feed 1 regular berry (this starts the 30 minute berry window)- Set a timer for 27 minutes, when it goes off, feed the remaining 9 berries to your Blissey (capping it at 10 per 30 mins) then when the timer ticks over 30mins, feed it 1 berry again and reset the 27 min timer- Do this for each pokemon in the gym and golden raz as needed to keep everyone alive- This will allow for 120 berries/hour or 1260 gym points/hour​--== Story ==--I LOVE Disneyland. For whatever reason my Wife and I have always loved it and we go as often as we can. Disneyland also happens to be an amazing place for Pokemon go with many gyms stops and natural spawns. Being a competitive player, I always try and fight for gyms when I am there and have had moderate success. The sheer number of people there makes it difficult to hold anything for any substantial time.Of all the gyms in Disneyland, none are as glorious as Sleeping Beauty's Castle which is the heart of the park, as it turns out, my favorite gym in the entire world. I started thinking about gilding it when my Wife proposed the latest trip and I did some quick math.​To get a gym to gold you need 30,000 gym points. I was already silver from my efforts to hold it before so that left 27,000 to go. Normally, I would aim to hold a gym for a long time to get to gold as you get 1 point/min and thus need to hold for ~21 days to get all 30k points. However, in Disneyland, nothing will hold for that long. Based on my experience from last time, I knew that the gyms are spoofed down every night and I would run out of golden raz even if I stayed up all night long defending. Raids are worth 1,000 points each and I might be able to get 1-2 of those in (in the park for 2 full days). That left fighting the gym and feeding berries. You get 1/10th of the defeated pokemon's CP in gym points as a reward for defeating it in battle and you get 10 points per berry fed. My friend gilded a commonly fought gym in Pier 39 San Francisco by sitting there and fighting it all day long which seemed reasonable but there was no way my wife was going to go for 10 hours of sitting in one place while in the park so that option was out. This left berry feeding as the only potential option.I have maxed out item storage of 2,000. Normally I carry 200 max potion 200 max revive 400 ultra balls ... etc. This leaves room for ~400 berries at most which is no where near enough. About 3 weeks before our trip I started prepping by deleting almost every item, in my inventory ... this made the game hard to play but it let me bring ~1800 berries (250 golden razz) on the trip. That is 18,000 points + 2,000 from raids + ~1,500 from holding for about 18 hours which is doable though hard. That plus 3,000 from being silver left me at a hypothetical 24,500 which is a lot by still 5,500 shy of gold. This meant I needed to get that 5,500 from a combination of battles won and berries found at the park which I felt was within reason.We planned to go to the park Tues night / Wednesday / Thursday late August which is a pretty low population time which I assumed would help. I also had the good fortune to have them close the area where the gym is located each night for the fireworks (at 9:00pm) and not reopen until the morning which meant if I could hold the gym through that time I could feed at peace until the spoofers took me out while I slept.I also had the good fortune to have a wonderfully supportive Wife who doesn't play games but understands my passion for them (thanks Honey!!) and she was fine with my having my phone out "to defend" at every meal in every line and on some of the rides (when it would not distract other guests).Finally, we stayed in the Disneyland Hotel and our room had Wifi (key so I Could keep defending) and access to 2 stops for me to flip and get even more berries.​We got there about mid-day Tuesday and went into the park and I went straight to the castle and took down the gym. I put my 98% lvl40 Blissey, Cuddle, in and she was immediately attacked. I would learn later that the gym is actually in range of the line for one of the park's most popular rides (Peter Pan) so it would often be attacked by people with nothing better to do than slam into Cuddle over and over. The first day went poorly ... the first attacker was quite good and killed my Blissey through 10 golden razz in about 20 mins. The second time I took it down it lasted longer but died to the same style of attack in only 3 hours when I was back in the hotel for the day. This was pretty discouraging as I needed to hold out for a LONG time to get all the berries fed but I hoped Monday would just be a worse day and Tuesday would see things improve.Tuesday morning we got up and hit the park and I immediately took the Castle. This was ~10:00am and I got some help pretty quickly being backed up by some other fellow Instinct players. Cuddle came under attack almost immediately and I started up the golen razz spam and the attackers gave up. The gym filled up pretty quickly and I immediately ran into my first problem ... people put pretty lousy stuff into gyms sometimes and I need ALL 6 pokemon to get 120 berries/hour.See the strategy looks like this: You feed 1 berry to each pokemon in the gym which starts the 30 minute window during which you can only feed 10 berries to any one pokemon. Then set a timer for 27 minutes. During the time, you have only fed 1 berry to each pokemon so you have plenty of room to spam golden razz. When the timer goes off, you get to feed the other 9 berries of the 10 berry limit to each pokemon and, almost immediately, the 30 min timer will roll over and you can feed another 10. Instead of immediately feeding the next 10, you feed 1 to each again, set the timer and wait for 27 minutes. Rinse-repeat.However, the timers were all staggered because pokemon were put into the gym at different times. Additionally, while you can just wait for a fresh 30 mins to start everyone off on the same foot, if the gym gets attacked by someone who can kill your Blissey during that time, you will need to feed berries to defend! This was frustrating and led me to berry defend a 2100 CP Rhydon for 10 strait hours just to make sure my rhythm didn't get interrupted.After some tense time, I managed to get all the pokemon in order and everyone synced ... it them came down to defending while enjoying the park. Here is what the Tuesday team looked like:​https://i.redd.it/fhalfdysuqj11.png​At about 7:30pm when everyone was sitting waiting for the fireworks to start the gym took some very real attacks. This was the make or break moment of the trip and I am eternally grateful to the folks who helped me defend ... I don't know if you were the people in the gym with me or just passer's-by who wanted to uphold the honor of team Instinct but at one point my blissey was capped on berries, had 3 minutes until the 30min timer reset and was at 1/3 heart about to go down ... some stranger berried her back up letting me reset the cycle (while at dinner with the Wife) and the attackers couldn't make it through before the area was closed and the fireworks started!After holding through the blitz, there were no attackers post-8:00pm and I stayed up until 2:00am feeding and playing games on my ipad ... Tuesday was a success and I went through about 1500 berries. Because the park is full of stops and t the hotel was on top of 2 stops, I actually farmed about 400 berries that day which put me pretty close to gold if I could just hold it Wednesday (the final day in the park)Wednesday we got to the park a bit later (she let me sleep in because I stayed up so late, thanks again Love!) and there was a magikarp raid on the castle, I did that, we hit Indiana Jones (the best ride IMO) and then I took the castle. It was fought a LOT more on Wednesday than Tuesday but the attackers were much weaker and Cuddle racked up the kills.Here is the Wednesday team:​https://i.redd.it/hx7j0fovuqj11.png​I was able to spam berries and defend using the 1 berry > 27 min timer > 9 berries > 1 berry sequence for the entire day with no real close calls. By the end of the day (I ran completely out of berries around 9:00pm and held just for the defending points) I managed to get up to 2800 berries fed and I was about 7,000 points over gold (I did eventually get a second raid in before the day was over). Cuddle also hit my personal best for defensive wins on a single pokemon at 24!!All in all, the experience was pretty fun though at times stressful as it could have been ruined by a single dedicated attacker with nothing else to do. Thankfully, everyone else wanted to enjoy the park just like we did and no one rained on my parade. Thanks for reading and I am happy to answer any and all questions!Bonus selfie / classic couples shot:​https://ift.tt/2PqzQVk via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2N8HbLO