Category: Vacation

After 2 days in a row at Disney parks, we decided to take a day off and just relax. We hung around the hotel, went swimming, did a little sight seeing and just recuperated from a couple long days.

The next day we did our last day at Disneyland. It was even busier then the days before so we ended up waiting in lots of lines. There were a few rides we wanted to try and get to but ended up deciding against it when lines were 30+ minutes. Just not worth it to wait that long when you have kids that get antsy.

At the end of the day, we went to Downtown Disney and looked through the shops there and let the kids get a souvenir. They have a cool Lego Store with some awesome lego sculptures outside, which was fun to see.

Then our last day there was another relaxing day. We decided kind of last minute to get a hotel closer to LAX, as we knew traffic would be horrible trying to get there the next morning. I think this was probably a really good idea, as our driver said on Monday mornings it would probably be at least a 2 hour drive. Then we flew to SLC the next morning and drove home.

It was a fun vacation, though I’m not sure we got to enough rides (due to long lines all the time) to justify the price tag Disney charges, but the kids loved it which was the whole point.

On our third day, we decided to do Disney California Adventure. They have a Cars land, where they’ve replicated the town of Radiator Springs from the Cars movies. William loves Cars, so we were excited to go there. The most popular ride is in that area, Radiator Springs Racers, and it gets a 90 minute plus wait time during the day. We went there first thing and still waited 20 minutes, but it was a really fun ride.

Kids got to see Mater and Lightning McQueen, which William loved. Later we got to meet Spiderman and Captain America, and McKinley got to meet Elsa and Anna, which she was excited about. We also got to see the Frozen show, which was fun.

All in all, we actually liked California Adventure a lot better than Disneyland. It’s a smaller park, so there was less people, less walking around, things were easier to find and just a better overall experience I think.

For our first full day in California, we decided to do Disneyland. We had bought a 3 day, 1 park-per-day ticket, so we figured 2 days at Disneyland, 1 day at Disney California Adventure. Our first day was fun but lots of people and lots of lines. I didn’t expect it to be quite so busy for a weekday in October but I guess that’s how it always is at Disneyland.

The kids did pretty well on most rides. The very first one we did they got scared (Finding Nemo Submarine, which I didn’t think would be bad but it does get kind of scary in places) but they did fine on everything else, though we couldn’t convince them to go on some rides, like Pirates of the Caribbean, which I think they would have liked just fine.

Probably the highlight was the Star Wars stuff. We got to meet Kylo Ren and Boba Fett and Lucas and McKinley got to participate in a Star Wars Training show, which they loved.

We decided, now that we were in a school district that had a spud harvest, that we should take a vacation sometime during that 2 week break. I initially was going to keep it simpler but we decided to try our luck with a trip to Disneyland. The kids were super excited to go there and probably even more excited to be able to ride a plane.

We decided to fly out of SLC instead of Idaho Falls, as it was a lot cheaper, so we started out with an early morning drive there, they our flight got delayed so we had a nice long wait in the airport. We finally got to LAX, got our baggage, requested a car (we used Lyft for all our transportation instead of renting a car, as it was a lot cheaper and I didn’t really want to have to drive in LA-area) and then ended up stuck in traffic for about an 1.5 hours, to drive the 35 miles to our hotel.