Monday, August 24, 2009

Disneyland!

This weekend I went to Disneyland! My husband and two of our friends went to California. The boys went to BlizzCon and the girls went to Disneyland.

My husband and I went up to their place after work on Wednesday. We spent the night, and on Thursday morning, we waited for them to gather a bunch of last minute things and then we were off... to fill up their car with gas. And then we were really off to Cali.

Then, just a couple hours into our drive, the car's AC broke. Yes, every car traveler's worst nightmare on a summer journey. It was roughly 2 hours into an 11 hour trip through the desert that we were a lot warmer than we anticipated. We stopped at the nearest town and talked to a gas station mechanic about the freon. Apparently, you need a special license and equipment to do whatever it is that needed doing. He gave us directions, but not the name of the place. He said the place had big windows. Well, all the car places we passed had big windows, and we had to stop for directions again. We were told it was the place that used to be a Ford dealership, but it didn't have any Ford signs anymore... Why that was relevant, I do not know. Anyway, we found the place and they spent just over an hour doing their car-stuff. We walked to a grocery store, making fun of how small town-folk gave directions. "It's the third house from the tree stump that was hit by lightning last year." I'm sure they thought stuff about us city-folk not knowing how to follow simple directions without GPS.

Anyway, when we got back the car-guy said that the compressor wasn't working even with the freon refilled. So he took the freon back out to reduce the price for us. I don't know if removing freon from a broken AC-device is normal procedure or not, but we thought it was odd.

We went for 1.5 hours and stopped at a Wal-Mart. We got sun screens to put in the windows and a little oscillating fan. It helped out a lot, but it was still horribly hot. 111 degrees outside (with windchill). Yuck!

After we passed Las Vegas I saw billboards with advertisements for "Alien Energy Jerky." It was jerky with caffeine in it. I kid you not, caffeinated jerky. And other than that, there was nothing between Las Vegas and the Los Angeles area except lots of desert and a few tiny towns (ghost towns, maybe).

The next day the boys and girls went their separate ways. The boys to their geek convention, and the girls to Disneyland.

Us girls went to the California Adventure park first. We saw Muppets in 3D and a live stage version of Aladdin, which were both really cute.

The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror was one of my favorite rides in this park. The story was that the Hollywood Tower Hotel was hit by lightning several decades ago and created some kind of time-warp, different dimension, twilight-zoney thing. The ride shot us upward, the windows opened so that we could see the whole park, then there was a flash of lightning and we dropped! We dropped a lot of the way in the dark with lightning and some ghosts, then shot up again. We bounced like this a couple times, looking outside sometimes and inside the spooky building other times. It was awesome, though I didn't want to go on it again. Here is a picture of the outside. On the left side there are some large open windows that people on the ride can see out before falling to their doom.



My second favorite on this side was the Grizzly River Run.

The next day we went to the regular Disneyland park. This one had the classic rides like the Mad Tea Party, where you sit in tea cups that spin around. We tried to spin fast, and we did once we started turning the wheel the right way, then we got too dizzy and stopped. We went on the "It's a Small World" ride, and got annoyed by the end because of the repetition. Here's a pic of the castle surrounding the small world:



My favorite by far was Space Mountain. This is an indoor roller coaster that's designed to make it feel like you're flying through space. It was so cool! You couldn't see the track in front of you so you never knew where you were going next. We also went on Splash Mountain and got really wet. More wet than the Grizzly River Run. I was the unfortunate person in the very front, and I think my knees were the only part that made it out dry because they were covered by the front of the "log" we were seated in. I don't think I was properly dry the rest of the day.

Another favorite, maybe in second place, was the Haunted Mansion. This was just lots of spookiness. The effects for the ghosts were amazing and the music was fun and creepy. We picked up an old man ghost hitchhiker O.O.

We went through the Sleeping Beauty Castle Walk Through. There was some story books open so you could read the story as you walked through and some little scenes you could see through windows. Here's a pic of the castle from the outside:



And here's a pic of me interrupting Princess Aurora and Prince Philip as they dance:



At the end of both days in Disneyland, my feet were very sore, and I got blisters. But it was a lot of fun nonetheless. Even the trip back was ok because the AC got fixed. Phew!

1 comment:

A.S.R. said...

Wow sounds like a ton of fun. It is a goal in my life to get my picture taken with all of the Diseny Princesses. I think that would be beyond cool. I plan on going once Willson is a little older, in maybe a year or two.