Universal Studios and Disneyland

The drive to Anaheim from the Grand Canyon was a long one.  An early start on Tuesday helped to get us to Anaheim in just over 8 hours.  There are tiny little itsy bitsy towns along the way, but only a few.  The Mojave desert is a monster, and a horrible place to drive through.  Joey-Linn and I have a running joke about Kansas being a awful state to drive though.  I think that the Mojave dessert might just be worse.  Hot, hot, hot, and looooong slow descents up and over mountain after mountain, especially for an RV.  We finally arrived in Anaheim and were met by the smoggy skies of Southern California that, depending on the time of day, hid the mountains. During our stay, the smog hid the sun until almost noon.  Once the smog was gone, I could see why gazillions of people choose to live here.  It wasn't easy to navigate the traffic and the 7 lane highways of California, but Paul did just fine.  We were exhausted, but excited about spending the next couple of days at Universal Studios and Disneyland.

Universal Studios was great!  The girls loved the ride based on the movie, The Mummy Returns, and Ty loved the Transformers ride.  All three, left the park declaring that they wanted to join Gru's minion army.  The Despicable Me ride was great, althogh I attribute Ella's love of minions to her fantastic 5th great teacher, Miss Link, who declared her students to be minions.  We left as the park was closing and the kids wanting to ride their favorite rides again.  The great thing about being in an RV is that we left the park and the kids were able to get ready for bed and get into bed before we left the parking lot.  They would need to rest up for day 2 of our stay in SoCal which would be spent at Disneyland.

We had a blast at Disneyland...despite it's princess perfection, it really was wonderful.  The high point of the day for Ty was when he was one of the kids picked out of the crowd to volunteer at the Jedi Knight Training Academy show.  His enormous smile and multiple fist pumps in the air said it all.  Libby loved meeting Ariel(her favorite), Snow White, and Cinderella.  Equally exciting and therefore personally pleasing for me was how thrilled the girls were to get some special attention from Mary Poppins herself as she rode her carousel horse down the parade route. Ella couldn't wait for the fireworks(her favorite part).  She was hooting and hollering the whole time.  I don't think they could coragrapgh the music any better.  The end of the day was kind of a blur.  The kids melted down and melted down quick.  Ty declaring that it had been the worst day ever because he dropped his last bite of ice cream and because we wouldn't buy him a light saber(he already has 4).  Ugh.....  By this time it was 11:00 pm and we were surrounded by screaming kids, it comes with the territory.