The Happiest Place on Earth

A year and a half ago when I qualified for the Olympic Trials the Chicago Marathon gave me a generous cash bonus.  Since I knew I would be headed to California for the trials I decided I would spend my prize money on a trip to Disneyland.  My family puts up with so much with all of my marathon training.  The older kids help watch the younger ones a lot when I need to get a run in.  They don't complain that dinner is often late or the laundry hasn't been folded.  My kids are my biggest fans.  They deserved this. The ironic thing is that my parents have lived in Southern California for almost 20 years.  We would visit a couple times a year but never go to Disneyland.  It was usually a holiday weekend when we were visiting and I never wanted to spend that kind of money to stand in line all day.  A year ago my parents sold their house and moved to Utah so I realized we wouldn't be visiting California nearly as often.  My kids were sad because their friends were always taking trips to Disneyland and we rarely did.  Skyler wasn't even born the last time we went.  Unfortunately the Olympic Trials fell on Valentine's and President's Day weekend, the one week in February everyone tells you not to go to Disneyland.  It would be busy but we decided to brave the crowds and go anyway.

First we spent Sunday going to church and visiting my brother in Long Beach.  On Monday we spent the day at the beach.  Unfortunately my brother and his girlfriend were so sick they weren't able to go with us.  My parents were still in town though and we spent an amazing summer (wait this is still winter) afternoon at Huntington Beach!  The beach was packed with people on the holiday with such unusually warm weather.  It was very comfortable to sit on the beach in swim suits and play in the water as opposed to the usual trips in the winter bundled up in jackets.  I was surprised how homesick it made me to go back to Huntington Beach and realize my parents didn't live there anymore.  I know that is silly since they were sitting right next to me but it sure seemed like we should just drive up the street to their house after playing at the beach instead of to the hotel.  Even though I only lived in California a couple summers in college, my parents house felt like home to me and we have so many great memories there.  Still, we enjoyed a beautiful beach day and stayed until sunset!

My plan was to wait until we were on our way to Anaheim to tell the kids we were going to Disneyland.  I thought it would be fun to surprise them.  I also wanted them to feel like the point of the trip to Califiornia was the Olympic Trials instead of wanting to get the race over with so they could go to Disneyland.  They kind of figured it out on their own over the weekend anyway.  We got to our hotel in Anaheim late Monday night then had to drag everyone out of bed to get to Disneyland early.  I was hoping it wasn't a bad sign that we were starting out two days at Disneyland tired!  My biggest complaint the last few times we have gone to Disneyland is that the kids got bored waiting in line and started to fight.  This year they were so good and although the park was crowded, it wasn't quite as bad as I anticipated and the kids were patient when we did have to wait.  We spent the first day in Disneyland and the second day in California Adventure.  Tuesday was one of the hottest days yet.  We enjoyed escaping to the indoor rides in the heat of the day.  There were a lot of rides Skyler wasn't tall enough for but he absolutely loved Casey Jr's Circus Train!  (It was almost worth the 50 minute wait: the longest one the whole trip!)  He was wiped out and asleep in the stroller by evening.  The older boys (Jason included) all loved all the new Star Wars features that had been added since we were there.  I wasn't sure it was really worth the wait to see Chewbaca but at least it was air conditioned!

We were finally back to the hotel and eating some pizza at 11:00 at night and then up early again the next morning for day 2.  This was vacation?  I thought I was supposed to be recovering from the marathon?  I think Skyler enjoyed California Adventure even more.  Kaitlyn and Andrew loved the roller coasters and since the park was smaller we were able to take Skyler to Bugs Life instead of spending our time just waiting for the older kids to get off the rides.  But the highlight for Skyler was definitely Cars Land, especially his favorite, Tow Mater!

The morning started out hot like the previous days but by lunch time some cloud cover had come in.  We knew there was a storm coming and were hoping it would wait until the park closed but by mid afternoon it was cooling off and the rain was starting.  We were still waiting for our fast passes for Radiator Springs Racers and hoping all the rides wouldn't shut down from the rain.  The ride was shut down for a while and we wandered around Cars Land.  Skyler was delighted to just run up and down the streets.  The ride finally opened up but since everyone was waiting for it we had an hour wait to get on.  Skyler was just barely too short and sad not to get a chance to ride.  We were able to take advantage of some fast passes though and ride a few times with shorter waits.  It was really starting to rain hard and getting cold.  We had brought along some jackets but with the rain we were starting to get really cold.  Most of the people had left the park though.  And with the anticipation of heading home the next day and vacation being over we just toughed it out and fit in as many rides as we could.  Everytime someone said they were cold and wanted to go there was another ride someone loved that had no wait and so we went again. We finally made it back to the hotel late completely soaked and exhausted!  We all got home feeling like we needed a vacation to recover but it was back to catching up with school and work that had been put off while we were gone.  But it was so worth it!