Sometimes things don’t go the way you expect them to. Sometimes you plan a nice relaxing weekend at home, prefaced by a casual Friday night dinner at your favorite winery with some of your favorite people. And sometimes, you get exactly the opposite.
Sometimes, it’s even better than what you planned….
That’s right, sometimes you randomly end up at Disneyland!
Can you tell I haven’t slept in that photo? Can you tell we got a phone call, wildly packed up the car and drove 8 hours through the night? I’m so in love with the fact that we have enough spontaneity in our lives to just decide to do something like that. It makes me happy.
Of course, today my feet are in pain. I packed for a night at the vineyard, not a full day of walking around two parks in flat sandals. And I’m still tired because I think we got a total of 12 hours of sleep over the course of two nights…only six of which were in a bed. But how could we say no? How, when we had no other plans for the weekend, could we turn down a day at Disneyland? And at practically no cost?
We couldn’t. Bottom line.
We got to the park around 10 am. We stopped by the hotel where BJ’s son and his family were staying to drop off our stuff. They generously offered us the second bedroom of their timeshare suite, so we had a place to stay. They have three adorable little girls (hold on, let me see if I can’t jack a photo from their mom’s facebook page for ya)…ah, there they are!
Adorable, right?
Anyway, they had so much fun! The oldest one went on Tower of Terror with us, and based on this photo, I think she had a better time than I did! (Actually, all three girls eventually went on the ride…I sure wouldn’t have at their age!). She’s the one on the far left, her dad is in blue, I’m the one next to him looking like I’m dying, and my husband…well, he just looks like a kid in a candy store, doesn’t he?
Despite my face, I actually love this ride. But I have this thing: when I’m on a roller coaster, I pull the shoulder bar thing down, and for some reason, I always want it to be one more click tighter….so when we were on California Screamin’, the roller coaster, just before Tower of Terror, Jim pushed down and gave me one more click. Well, that turned out to be a bad plan because it totally squashed my stomach and I got a bit of vertigo feeling all throughout the ride. I blame this mostly on lack of sleep. I never get that feeling on rides!
Well, we got off and walked to Tower of Terror, but my heart rate just wasn’t slowing any. All the way up to the door of the elevator (in case you don’t know about this ride, we are sitting in a “service elevator car”), my heart was racing and I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t puke with all the flying up and down this ride does. So that look was “Don’t yack, don’t yack, don’t yack!” not “holy cow, this is scaaaaaary.” Why I opened my mouth, I’m not sure. If I did yack, that wasn’t going to do me any favors. But alas, no yacking. I did, however, walk off the ride shaking like a mad person and almost fell into a wall. But that’s okay. That didn’t piss off and gross out a whole “Elevator car” full of people. And I got over it soon enough.
Most of the day, Jim and I spent doing our own thing. We spent a little bit of time in the morning with the girls and BJ and Ash, but they were doing kid stuff and we wanted to ride a few of our favorites while we were there. I was fully expecting lunch to cause problems for me with all of my allergies, but I managed to find myself a pretty delicious lunch (that doesn’t mean we didn’t peek in at six different menus before we chose, though…). There’s a Mexican restaurant in Frontierland that served up this baby:
It’s a roasted veggie tostada…except I had her leave out the shell. It had refried beans, lettuce, roasted carrots, zuccini, squash, two kinds of peppers and onions, guacamole, cheese, salsa, and sour cream. I was quite impressed. Sure it cost me $10, but for Disneyland food? This thing wasalmost worth it. I capped it off with a $5 plate of fruit which contained several kinds of fruit including papaya, mango, kiwi, oranges, strawberries, blueberries and three different kinds of melon. Lunch was good.
For a Saturday when school is out, the crowds were pretty tame. I don’t think we waited more than 20 minutes for any ride. We only got one fast pass all day and that was for Indiana Jones, which is still, I believe, one of the most popular rides at either park.
We didn’t, however, attempt to ride any of the rides at the new CarsLand. No fast passes and wait times soaring to 185 minutes (at least that was the highest I ever saw on mousewait…great app for Disney parks, by the way…and dern accurate). CarsLand itself was pretty cool, though, like you were actually walking down the streets of Radiator Springs (with 500,000 of your closest friends).
Kind of makes me want to go home and watch Cars.
We also cruised by the new Starbucks they put in California Adventure (but passed on the $5 tall drinks) and the new front section of the park where the giant fountain and the Golden Gate Bridge used to be. Overall, we were pretty impressed (sorry, by that time I was too tired and having too much fun to remember to take any photos).
After a small dinner debacle (ok, it wasn’t small, but I don’t really want to go into it again…), we went back to the hotel and practically fell into bed. It had been a long day, and we had another long day of driving ahead of us in the morning…bright and early at 5:00 a.m….
But holy moly, was it worth it!
How was your weekend? Did you do anything crazy or fun? Do you ever up and head out on an adventure on a whim?
