Disneyland October 2010 Trip: Day 1

As usual, my Disneyland Trip Reports are long and detailed with lots of photos, so I'll be updating the blog every couple days with more stuff. Today is the re-cap of Day 1.

Let’s start the day BEFORE the trip on Tuesday Oct 20th. We had to rent a van for the trip, so we could all fit in one vehicle (and have room for luggage, snacks, etc.) So we drove over to the tiny airport in Gilbert. Who even USES that place?—it looks like it’s all Cessna’s over there! On the way out, Amanda turned right instead of left and we ended up taking the long way home—further proof that she needs me as a navigator.

We got the car all packed up that day so we could just head out first thing in the morning.

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE

Wednesday October 20th

We were curious to see how different it would feel driving only 6 hours to Disneyland instead of the 10-11 we usually drove from Utah. In a word: AWESOME. It went by SO FAST, and having no significant mountains to wind through was even better.

[Ignore the past/present tense shifts--I was too lazy to keep them consistent.]

6:10—we leave the house
8:25—while still in AZ (9miles from the CA/AZ border), Abe looks out the window and says, “I think I see the Monorail!!” He kept having trouble with the length of the drive, and kept thinking we were almost there or asking if we WERE there.
8:31—entered California, stopping at Blythe to get gas/take a bathroom break, etc. On the door of the men’s room was a printed sign that read exactly as follows, including the capitalization, punctuation, line breaks:

Please lift
(Handle up) –
Before leaving
To unlock door
Thank you.

Exactly the kind of sign I’d expect from people in Blythe—am I right?!?!

8:55—back on the road
10:30—we passed through the wind farms, which were awesome. Just when we thought we’d seen them all, we’d round a corner and see a whole bunch more:



10:50—we merged from I-10 to the CA-60, and as we passed the “Anaheim: 31 Miles” sign, Abe yells, “Anaheim is OURS!!!”
11:50—we arrive at the Howard Johnson Anaheim and do a pre-check-in so we can park our car and get our Disneyland tickets (though it was too early to go to our room).
12:25—we headed over to Disneyland


12:45—Entered Disneyland


1:00—we check the “wait times board” at the end of Main Street and immediately threw out my planned itinerary. Wait times for pretty much every ride were less than 10 minutes, including Splash Mountain, Indiana Jones, and Space Mountain.
1:05—After grabbing Fastpasses for Indiana Jones (which we ended up not using because the lines stayed short), Amanda and the 3 older kids rode Splash Mountain, which the boys HATED.


12:25—Haunted Mansion Holiday


1:45—Andy, Maddy and Joel ride the Indiana Jones Adventure, then Amanda, Maddy and Joel ride it.
2:30—Pirates of the Caribbean, which Abe USED to love, but hated this time (“I don’t like the drops.”)
3:05—Got Space Mountain Fastpasses for Amanda and Maddy, then we went to see “Captain EO” (which, if you didn’t know, has returned to Disneyland as a “Tribute” to Michael Jackson.)


They’ve “enhanced” it by using the “bouncing floors” effect that had been used in “Honey, I Shrunk the Audience. It was fun during the flying/action scenes at the start, but totally unnecessary and a little obnoxious during the musical numbers, when the floors bounced to the beat for like 8 minutes straight.
3:45—Amanda and Maddy went on Space Mountain Ghost Galaxy—this is a special version of Space Mountain that’s during Halloween Time where they have creepy ghosts and sound effects on the ride—Amanda said it was much scarier.

OH, I haven't been listing all the bathroom breaks for you, sorry. Here's a picture of the Men's room sign near Space Mountain, though:



4:00—Ate dinner at the Plaza Inn. I think we’ve agreed this is our favorite place to eat. Great food and huge portions (they game Amanda 3 big pieces of chicken and gave me 2 huge breasts, which I’m ALWAYS fine with!)





While we were there, we saw Cody, one of the guys I animated the “Chico” video for. He and his twin brother Toby live down there and work at the park (at least Toby does). It was nice to meet them in person during the trip, having only talked to them on the phone or via email. Cody gave us some “Attraction Readmission Passes” which allowed us to skip the lines on a couple rides (by going through the exit or Fastpass line) instead of waiting in the normal queue. More about that later.
4:55—Rode Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters. Here are some on-ride photos (note Joel’s “I will destroy you!” face:




5:15—We rode the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage.


This was our longest line of the day. We were a little confused about how the Attraction Readmission passes worked and we didn’t use them on this, even though we should have.

Then we headed over to Fantasyland:



6:15—Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride
6:25—King Arthur’s Carousel
6:40—After asking a cast member how to use the Readmission Passes, we rode Peter Pan’s Flight using one of the passes (skipping the 20-minute wait)
6:45—Pinnochio’s Daring Journey
6:50—Snow White’s Scary Adventures (which has a fun new effect where the Queen’s room transforms)
7:00—We saw Toby working in Fantasyland and he asked us what ride we wanted to go on. We chose Casey Jr. and he took us in through the exit and we got onto the next train. Yeah, pretty awesome.
7:20—Alice in Wonderland
7:45—left Disneyland and went to the hotel.

When we got into our room, we saw that the hotel staff had left us a huge goody bag for the kids with bananas, trail mix, stuffed animals, travel activity books, and a fun note:




The room and hotel were great, and we definitely will be staying there again. The room was cleaner and the beds were more comfortable than the Castle Inn or even the Disneyland Hotel. The shower had plenty of hot water (in fact, too much—there was like a millimeter difference between hot and cold.) We never had to turn the A/C on, and just check out the view from our balcony:



It didn’t hurt that our hotel stay was free!

OK, so that's Day 1. Day 2 will be coming soon!

Happy Birthdays and Miscellaneous

A lot to cover this time around. Let’s break it down:

Amanda and Abe’s Birthday(s)

Of course we’ve gotta start with the obvious today—10/10/10: Amanda’s 31st birthday and Abe’s 5th birthday. They both got to open their presents this morning, though Abe’s birthday party will be tomorrow, when Amanda’s mom is here (she’s going to be visiting for a week).

Amanda got a new clock for her clock collection, a hand-held quilting frame (man, in the 21st century, EVERYTHING has gone hand-held!), a box of Eggo’s cereal (her favorite), and the book “The Continuous Atonement” (thanks for the suggestion, Libby!).

Abe got a Spider-man costume, an Iron Man costume, and some Iron Man accessories (sense a theme here?) He then announced that he wanted to be War Machine for Halloween, and we quickly pointed out that he had to choose from his EXISTING costumes and we weren’t buying any others.

Here he is in his outfits:




Tonight we’re having roast and potatoes and Ding-Dong Cake. Here’s a picture of that cake (photo from Oct. 2008) in case you forgot the deliciousness:



And Abe chose crepes for dinner tomorrow, followed by a Blue’s Clues cake (which he now wants to change to a Spider-man cake)…(I’m gonna want a burger to counteract all that sugar tomorrow).

The Couch

As you already know, we had to leave our couch up in Utah, so we bought a few cheap chairs from Goodwill down here. Well, a couple weeks ago, there was a yard sale/moving sale just up the street and Amanda bought a couch for $50 bucks—it is in great shape (it was an old couple who kept it in good condition). Here’s a picture:



The morning we picked it up, we were walking to their house to get the couch and my foot slipped off the edge of the sidewalk—but instead of falling flat on my face, I did an AWESOME side-roll, curling into the direction of my fall and recovering perfectly—like I was in Olympic Tumbling or something (is there such a thing?)

Bread

Arizona grocery stores have an awesome assortment of tortillas, but their sliced bread is severely lacking. In Utah, we loved Grandma Sycamore’s Home-Maid Bread. It was moist and delicious. Here in AZ, we’re stuck with Sara Lee or other national brands. It’s very distressing. Almost makes us want to move back to—no, now that’s just SILLY.

Church Calling

A couple weeks ago I got a phone call from a counselor in the Bishopric, wanting to meet with me. And thus began stress. I don’t like to say no to a calling, so I was worried he was going to call me to scouts, since I WOULD have to say NO. Luckily, I was called to be 1st Counselor in the Sunday School Presidency, which, so far, has meant that I do absolutely NOTHING. Apparently the ward has been without a Sunday School Presidency for a while. We’ll see how it goes!

Abe’s Art

Abe’s been doing a lot of artwork lately. Here’s his picture of a guy paying tithing:



And a chalk drawing of Spider-man and Green Goblin:



Elliott’s Walker



Amanda was very sad to leave the toy shopping cart in Utah, so she was really excited to find this toy walker at Goodwill, which Elliott LOVES:



Knit-wits

So (sew?), Amanda is knitting a sweater for Madison, and the directions told her to increase the rows by 1 stitch every 4 rows, which led to confusion as far as what they meant by “every 4 rows”—was that “every fourth row” or “on the 5th row” and it turned out that Amanda and I were totally agreed as to what they meant, but because of our individual thought processes, we thought the other was thinking things wrong. There was a whole discussion of changing it on the 1st row, 4th row, 5th row, etc. There was also some back or front thing thrown into the equation.

My brain grouped common stitch amounts into sections, so you would do 4 rows, then increase on the 5th row(also 1st of a new set of 4), like this:

…47__48, 48, 48, 48__ 49, 49, 49, 49 __ 50, 50, 50, 50__51, 51…

Amanda’s brain saw it increasing on the 4th stitch, like this:

…47, 48__48, 48, 48, 49 __ 49, 49, 49, 50 __ 50, 50, 50, 51 __ 51...

OK, my brain hurts. I need a vacation…next blog post will be about Disneyland, I’m sure.

Goodbye Summer, Hello Fall!

Fall starts this week, and we’re excited for the weather to be getting a little cooler—this past week, the highs were only around 105!! That’s like “sweater weather” here!

Last night, to celebrate the end of summer and start of fall, we made hamburgers and fries for dinner and ate Costco pumpkin pie for dessert (OK, really we just had a hankerin’ for burgers and we had a coupon for $1 off the pie, it just works well as a “meeting of the seasons,” so just go with me on this one…)

The kids have picture day this week, but since Elliott’s not in school yet, we got his pictures taken at Target (we’ll get Abe’s pics taken soon, too). Here are the pictures we ended up buying of Elliott:






On Friday, Maddy had a sleepover at her friend Rainy’s house. I mean Cloudy—no, Stormy…what is it, Maddy? Raimey!!!

Anyway, she’s a nice girl in the ward that’s also in her class at school. Maddy called the house in a panic Friday night because Raimey’s parents were going out on a date and she wasn’t sure it was OK to be at her friend’s house without a grown-up. We were out getting groceries at the time and so she left a panicked message on the phone. We called her as soon as we got home and got it all worked out, but that was very responsible of her to call. She ended up having a lot of fun, then the next morning she had a Stake Activity Day at the church that she enjoyed.

Maddy also joined the soccer team—here’s her official soccer photo:



(OK, that MIGHT be fake. People with glasses can’t play sports, anyway.)

Joel got his Bobcat badge, and is working hard on his Wolf, which for some reason included making stilts out of tin cans and yarn. Tell me again, why is scouts a useful program? So we’re teaching our boys that if they’re out in the woods and have some canned food and yarn/rope and something to drill holes into the cans, they can make stilts to be able to grab things 4 inches out of their reach?? Well, as long as he thinks it’s fun, it’s better than having him out on the streets selling drugs and spray-painting train cars (the only viable alternatives).

Elliott’s eating us out of house and home, as this picture proves:



I’ve been REALLY busy at work with a bunch of projects due the 27th. It’s been interesting and a little awkward, because the projects I’ve been doing this month are being done in English, Spanish, and French. That means I’ve been animating each project in English first, then once that gets client approval, I adjust the animation and text to match the foreign language audio. I’ve definitely had to have copies of the scripts side-by-side to keep track of what I’m doing, but there have been very few problems/errors in my conversions.

I gave a talk in church last week, which I over-prepared for (the talk was basically all quotes from Conference talks with some minor filler). I cut it down from 20 pages to 11, then had to cut down more as I spoke to fit into the 12 minutes I had. It seemed to go well, despite the fact that, as a Peterson, my speaking voice is much louder than you’re used to hearing in a church NOT led by a “hellfire and damnation” preacher.

Amanda has been knitting stuff like crazy, and has been downloading projects from Ravelry that should keep her busy for years. She’s already warned the kids that several of their presents will be hand-made.

Well, I guess that’s about it—September has been pretty boring--just trying to trudge through it until October arrives.