Disneyland recap--Finally

Make a Smilebox slideshow

So I'm finally getting around to blogging about Disneyland! I just had so many pictures to post, so I tried something new--a smilebox slide show. I still have a lot to learn about smilebox, apparently, but hopefully you can view the pics if you want to... Here's how our vaca went down:

We left our house on Fri, Aug. 24th. It took 16 hours for us to get to our hotel, but we made it safely there and the kids were actually pretty good in the car. (On a side note, Jake stayed home with my mom and dad, and Liz...thanks you guys!!)

On Saturday, we braved Disneyland. Our tickets got us into the park an hour early, so we got the really popular rides out of the way first, like Space Mountain (which most of us didn't like so much). It actually wasn't all that busy, considering it was a Saturday in July! We rode a ton of rides and were worn out by the end of the day, so on Sunday, we just hung out swimming a lot at our hotel and napping. :)

Monday, we hit Disney again. This time we figured out how to buy the right bus passes so we could have unlimited trips back and froth to Disney. On Saturday, we had walked back...sort-of a bus pass mix-up... On Monday, we again went full speed and tried to get all the rides we had missed on Saturday. We went home for a little while in the afternoon, then back for the parades and fireworks, which we almost missed. Again we were worn out, but had a ton of fun!

Tuesday, we tried to meet as many characters as we could. We got several in, including some princesses for Sydney while she and Cathy waited in line for an hour and a half--the longest line of our whole trip!!! Needless to say, we took our time with those princesses once we got in there. We went back again that night for the fireworks so we could be closer, and this time, they were amazing! It is by far the best fireworks show I've ever seen! It really was great!

Wednesday morning, we drove down to San Diego and hit Sea World. We mostly just went to the shows: Shamu, the dolphins, and Cirque de la Mer (amazing). We were pretty tired from our time at Disney, so we left a little early to go swimming at our hotel, which we hadn't seen yet...

It was awful! The Garmin said we were at the right spot, but we just couldn't believe this could be our "hotel and suites." Tim went to see if it was the right place, and sadly, it was. Our room was o.k., but the place itself was scary. The pool that the kids wanted to swim in butted up to the hotel bar and there were scary people in it (I'm pretty sure they were some sort of gang...). So we told them they couldn't swim, which made them really sad, but seriously, we were afraid for their safety. Needless to say, the next morning we checked out of that place before we left for the zoo...

Thursday was zoo day. We had a good time there, and the kids' favorite thing was feeding the giraffes. Again we were SOO tired, so we left in the afternoon and drove back to Anaheim to stay the last night in our "safe" hotel. That way we had a head-start for our drive back on Friday. We took a different route home and shaved off about an hour and a half, which was great. It was good to get home to Jake and to relieve my family from watching him.

All in all, it was a really great trip--a little too long, perhaps, but still great. I hope the kids can remember it for a long time cause we won't be doing it again for a while!!!