California Dreaming Part 2

After spending the last 5 days driving from Indiana to California I was extremely exhausted. We had just driven across 8 states in less than a week with my daughter in tow; I honestly never expected to do something like this without having a nervous breakdown along the way. Surprisingly we didn’t have too many meltdowns from Gabby on our trip. I attribute this to the fact that Nanny was in the back seat with her…and she also slept through a lot of the driving. So we have now arrived in Anaheim; first night here and we get to go to the rooftop of our hotel to watch the fireworks display at Disneyland! What a wonderful treat!!

Disneyland fireworks seen from our hotel rooftop

Day 6: We visited the Queen Mary in Long Beach. I can’t begin to explain how dysfunctional this trip ended up being. We took the self-guided tour, but my mother in-law, Mary, only wanted to see the Princess Diana exhibit. She abandoned the tour in favor of this exhibit, and from there everyone just pretty much did their own thing. Ryan and I walked around the decks with the kids who weren’t really interested in learning the history of the RMS Queen Mary through the self-guided tour. My father in-law, Ray, stayed close by waiting for Mary to finish her exhibit.  My sister in-law, Natalie, trailed along with her mother to see the Princess Di exhibit. My sister in-law, Allie, and her boyfriend, Billy, are the only people who continued the self-guided tour. I didn’t really get to learn much or explore much of the ship, but it was a great experience just to be able to walk onto a ship that has so much history that I normally would not get to see.

Day 7: Our first trip to the beach was at Santa Monica Beach. This was a really fun day for us. It was the first time Dylan and Gabby had ever seen the Pacific Ocean and the first family trip taken to any ocean. We buried Gabby in the sand and gave her a mermaid tail, we dug in the wet sand looking for sand crabs, we saw a guy feeding seagulls, and we got to use our boogie boards in the water. We were so burned out after playing on the beach and in the water that we didn’t get to go to the pier for the rides. We had a BLAST!!

Day 8: Our trip to the happiest place on earth, Disneyland!! This trip was most definitely a successful adventure. We had to get a family fast pass for Gabby since we knew she couldn’t handle waiting in a long line. We didn’t get to ride everything, but I’m completely okay with that. We went on the Finding Nemo ride, Space Mountain, Disneyland Railroad, Matterhorn, Snow White, Haunted Mansion, Splash Mountain, and Pirates of the Caribbean (several times). Unfortunately, Gabby wasn’t tall enough for the Indiana Jones ride. I guess we will have to make a return trip to Disneyland one day. We got to meet Thor from the Avengers; Gabby asked him lots of questions. Dylan was picked for Jedi Training where he had a lightsaber duel with his hero Darth Vader. I was almost certain he’d try to join the Dark Side! We tried on many hats at the Mad Hatter’s hat shop. We allowed for each child to pick out something special to take home from the gift shops. Dylan built his own lightsaber, red of course, like Lord Vader. Gabby bought herself an Anna/Elsa doll. We stayed at the park until closing time and left wishing we had one more day to explore.

Day 9: Anaheim Angels game and a trip to Huntington Beach to see the old house. My in-laws took Dylan and Gabby to their first Angels baseball game while Ryan and I checked out my hometown together. We saw the house where I grew up when I lived in Huntington Beach, and drove by all the places I remembered as a kid. It was a nice trip filled with many memories and a ton of nostalgia. Not a lot has changed since I left…which is really surprising since I haven’t lived there in more than a decade. We also had to make a stop at Carls Jr. for some fried zucchini. Sounds strange I know, but there is no Carls Jr. in Indiana and I had to complete the nostalgia journey, LOL! It was worth it!! This day was also my mother in-laws birthday, so we also had dinner at Bubba’s Shrimp Co. Then we headed back to Huntington Beach to spend sunset as a family at the pier.

Day 10: Hollywood Walk of Fame and The El Capitan Theatre. We went to Hollywood with only one purpose. To find Peter Jackson’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We are really big nerds and I am a huge fan of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. My dream would be to one day make it to New Zealand for a family vacation just so we can go to Hobbiton. We found PJ’s star pretty quickly, so we decided to see a movie that Gabby really wanted to see at a 89 year old theatre called the El Capitan. It was well worth the money we paid for the tickets. Inside Out was a great movie, we had such a great time! It was a little overwhelming with all the people dressed as fun characters like Capt Jack Sparrow, Spiderman, Batman, and minions and then asking for money for photos or high fives. We ended up telling the kids not to talk to anyone because we didn’t feel comfortable with all of these random people just walking up to us wanting some money in return and the kids really didn’t understand that the people in costume expected money for photo ops and high fives!

Day 11: Whale watching experience at Newport Beach. Well we didn’t get to see any whales, but we did get to see dolphins and some seals on a buoy. It was pretty cool. We ate breakfast on the boat that tasted fantastic. The kids really liked being surrounded by dolphins who were following the boat. It was a little difficult at times to keep Gabby calm since we were on an enclosed space and it was not easy to take her to a quiet place when she became upset. She really just didn’t understand why we didn’t want her walking all over the boat; it wasn’t something she saw as dangerous.

That was our last day in Cali. After the Whale Watching we started our drive to our next vacation destination to visit with family in Arizona.

California Dreaming Part 1

Our Trip to California this summer!!!

The Family at the peir in Huntington Beach, CA

So we packed up our Toyota Corolla at the end of June and headed west. Our ultimate destination was the beautiful sunny coastline of Southern California. We had previously arranged to drive with just myself, my husband Ryan, and my grandmother (aka “Nanny”). Nanny hadn’t had a vacation in years and I needed a driver to switch off with, so she happily agreed to go with us. The kids were both supposed to be flying with my in-laws to Vegas and then driving the rest of the way with us to Cali. However, two weeks prior to our trip we decided that we weren’t sure if Gabby was ready to fly (with her anxiety of new things) so we cancelled her ticket and added her to our car passenger list.

Our 2 hr traffic jam

Gabby getting a tour of a semi

Day 1: We left Indiana after a late morning start due to last minute unpreparedness about our schedule. We ran into some issues as soon as we made it to Illinois. There was apparently a very serious accident on the section of I-70 we were traveling. We ended up trapped on the freeway for 2 hours with a 6 year old with severe behavioral issues and very little patience. The first obstacle with this was the almost immediate need for her to go potty. We had to convince her that the only way to go was outside in the flora and fauna alongside the freeway. It was a very difficult task to get her to finally agree to pee out in nature, but mission accomplished! Then boredom set in after she decided that she had no interest in the coloring books, video games, or movies that we brought for our journey. This was alleviated when a trucker who was also trapped in gridlock asked my daughter if she’d like a tour of the truck cab and get to blow the horn. The rest of the time was passed by letting her pick wildflowers along that stretch of shutdown highway. That was fun! After leaving our highway incident behind, we traveled all the way through Illinois, Missouri, and most of Kansas before calling day 1 a night.

beginning of the Rockies

Gabby in the Rocky Mountains

 

Day 2: The following morning we left Kansas and made our way into the Colorado Rockies before nightfall. It was a beautiful sight, but letting my 70 year old grandmother drive our not fully paid off leased vehicle through the mountains was scary as hell!! We made it through the worst part of the mountains before dark and when night came I took over and drove the rest of the way out and into Utah where we booked it hoping to make it into Nevada overnight. It was good that the speed limit in Utah is like 90, we made good timing and I thought we were going to make it into Nevada before the next morning, but then exhaustion began to hit me. We ended up stopping at a gas station near the end of our Utah journey and sleeping until morning in the car. Having not anticipated how long the Utah section of our trip would be we failed to make plans on finding a hotel. We all slept pretty well for being crammed in a small model car and being at a gas station/truck stop area; I think it was mostly due to exhaustion and frustration.

Beautiful Colorado Rockies

View of the Colorado Rockies

Day 3: We woke up in the car at the truck stop, at dawn! Not at all surprising when considering our situation. I was very determined to get us to our next stopping point which was Las Vegas!! We got to drive trough some of Arizona on the way to Nevada. The desert is one of the least likely places I’d ever think to find beauty, but the scenery there is quite spectacular! I saw backdrops I’d only seen in paintings during our drive through the deserts of Arizona and Nevada. We finally made it to our hotel in Las Vegas where we were to stay for the weekend before heading to Cali.

Desert in Nevada

Desert in Arizona

Day 4: We met up with my son Dylan, and my in-laws, and my husband’s sisters who flew in from Indianapolis. Dylan loved his 1st airplane ride; he didn’t get sick and wasn’t bothered by his ears popping. We stayed in a very small 1br hotel with a pull-out sofa; it was quite cramped. We had Ryan, his mom Mary, his step-dad Ray, his sister Natalie, his sister Allison and her boyfriend Billy, and my daughter Gabby and I in this tiny hotel room. Luckily, Dylan and Nanny stayed in a hotel with my step-mom and sister who drove up from Arizona to spend some time with us in Vegas. We spent the evening at one of our favorite Las Vegas hangouts, Circus Circus Hotel & Casino. Dylan and Gabby really enjoyed the game area and the performances! We just happened to be visiting Sin City during EDC Las Vegas and the funniest thing that happened from our time in Vegas was when my 7 year old son, Dylan asked me if we had traveled to a country where people don’t where as many clothes, LOL!! He had never seen so many scantily clad women in his life, and we had to explain to him that this is just how people like to dress in Las Vegas. A drunk woman dressed in not much more than a string bikini actually apologized to my son in passing while we were out after seeing how distressed he looked at the sight of her!

Dylan in the window seat

Fun at 30,000ft

Day 5: We left Sin City in the afternoon and made our way to California, making a special trip to Running Springs to drop Nanny off at her cousin Wally’s cabin where she was going to spend the week. We stayed for a little while catching up with Wally and his wife before we headed back down the mountain and back on the freeway towards our hotel in Anaheim.

Beautiful View from Wally’s Cabin in Running Springs, CA