Disneyland / California Adventure Day 1

Ok. I admit it was my idea to go to Disneyland before I started working again, and I knew it would be crowded in August, but I didn’t have a clue how bad it would be. After the first day our leg muscles were so cramped, and we figured out it was because of walking in crowds – you can’t walk at your normal gait for fear of running into people. And the wait times for the rides – unbelievable! At least we were able to get fast passes some of the time. So here’s our story.

The trip started out the same way – Rick worked all night and we left as soon as he got home. This time I decided to bring the dvd player, and the day before I bought two new movies so Bradley would be entertained – High School Musical (totally safe) and Bench Warmers (I figured, how bad could it be?). So we start the trip, and Bench Warmers is playing, and I’m listening, and all I can hear are bad words and suggestive language. I’m having this internal dialogue – Bradley is totally cracking up at this movie, he’s not complaining about being in the car, but man, this movie is really bad for kids – what should I do? Rick gets about a 30 minute nap before I decide that Bench Warmers is way too bad to keep letting it play. Of course, that sends Bradley into a melt-down – “all you care about is yourself, you don’t care about me at all, etc….”. It takes me about 30 more minutes of total quiet to get Ella (and Rick) to sleep, and Bradley joins them for 20 minutes only. To his credit, he did stay quiet for the rest of the hour that Ella was asleep, but he more than made up for it when she woke up! Luckily the trip to Anaheim was only 4 hours.

We stayed at the Tropicana – it is an older hotel, but it’s right across the street from the entrance to Disneyland/California Adventure. After lunch, we had a dip in the pool, a nap, and headed to Downtown Disney. After checking out a couple restaurants, we decided on the House of Blues. We had a little bit of a wait (naturally) and they had a guy playing the blues out in the courtyard. One of the first songs we heard him play was “Give Me Back My Wig” – one of our favorites from my itunes blues list (thank you David Hoppenstedt for the list!!). We really enjoyed listening to him, but it sure made us homesick (a feeling I would get a lot during this trip). I love the last picture in this collage – I said I would duck down and Rick could take a picture of just the kids, but Ella ducked with me!