"The Best Vacation Ever"

This is an exact quote from Caitlin, who while sitting in an Arby's in San Diego declared our 3 day tour of Disneyland "the best vacation ever". I'm not sure if Rik agrees with that, but, we did have fun!

We started the fun by getting up at 12:30am on Monday morning so that we could start our drive to LA! We arrived in LA just in time for rush hour. Besides sitting in traffic and seeing a rollover accident, we did make it to Anaheim with plenty of time to eat breakfast and scope out our hotel before CA Adventure opened.

We were one of the first in the gate and off to see what there was to ride on since none of us had been there before. I'm not sure what I was expecting, and it might have been because there was quite a bit of the park under construction, but it was a lot smaller with a lot less to do than Disneyland. If I had been the one in charge of building it, I would have just added it as another "land" to Disneyland and saved myself the trouble of an additional theme park! The kids are pictured here in front of California Screamin' - which we rode twice - and was pretty fun. I was disappointed that they took down the famous Mickey ears off of this ride! My favorite ride there was the Soarin Over California. It made you think you were in a glider of some sort and were flying over different places in CA. While this may sound just OK, what made it neat was they had smells involved too - you could smell the orange trees, the salt air, etc. I thought that this was a cool idea!!

Then off to Disneyland. At about 6:30pm. A little anticlimatic, but we had run out of things to do at CA Adventure, and many rides had run out of Fastpasses for the day. Of course, this is the busiest time that we could have picked to go to Disneyland, but we did get in a couple of rides before we were all just too tired to care. It might have had something to do with the fact that we had been up since 12:30 and it was now 9:30pm!

The next morning, we had a pass for early entry into Disneyland. How this was part of our package, I don't know, but what a nice surprise! Caitlin woke up not feeling good at all, so I took Philip and we went and enjoyed our "Magic Morning". We rode a LOT of stuff in the extra hour we had there. It's amazing what you can get done without thousands of people in your way! Two hours later, Rik called and said that they were almost to the entry gate and Caitlin was feeling better. I was relieved because I had been so sad that she was missing out on all this fun! So, we spent the rest of the day riding everything possible - sometimes even 2 or 3 times. My favorite part of that day was riding on Thunder Mountain Railroad as the fireworks were going off that evening. It was really pretty!
Day three of our adventure was a little more slow paced, but we still managed to ride many rides many more times than we deserved! All in all, our total for Thunder Mountain was 6 times! I have never ridden it more than once while at the park, so this was really an exception!

We were planning on going to the beach on Thursday, relaxing and going home, but a lady at breakfast came up to us and offered us her San Diego Zoo tix that she wasn't planning on using. She just wanted to give them to us. So, we made the trip down to San Diego and spent some time there. We saw a couple of shows, rode the bus and the sky view tram, and of course saw the panda...

I think we wore the kids out though - it was pretty quiet on the way home! (And for the record, I'm pretty Disneyland-ed out! I should be able to last a few years before we go back! :))