Our Disneyland Trip 2014

In June of this year, Peter's work was sending him down to California, right near Disneyland, so Peter thought that we should make a family vacation out of it when he found out.  The conference was during the last week of school, so we decided to make it a surprise and didn't tell the girls anything.  When the time came close, we told the girls that Peter was leaving for his yearly trip for work.  We even played it up a lot talking about maybe he'd make a trip to Disneyland one of the times.  Boy were the girls jealous!  We found out that the weekend we came back, was the weekend the Skating Regionals was down in Portland, OR so we figured we'd fly out and back in from there.  As the time came we said that we would drive down Dad down and visit Grandma Sara for the weekend.  It was great convincing the girls that we needed to pack 10 days worth of clothes for a one night stay at Grandma's house.  After all, we all know that grandma loves to play outside and get dirty and they might need a bunch of change of clothes.  They knew that we weren't staying a week, they still had a week left of school... :)

 
We drove down to Vancouver on Saturday and hung out the night with Auntie Kathi.... Grandma was in Mexico.  Early, early Sunday morning Peter and I woke up, pre-loaded the baggage so the girls wouldn't see that we were bringing in all of the baggage, and got the girls up and ready to go.  The girls still thought we were just taking Dad to the airport to say goodbye for the week.  They were getting so sad that we were going to say goodbye, it was so difficult not to just tell them, but I'm glad we didn't give in!  We told the girls that we had made special arrangements to get through security so we could say goodbye to Dad at the gate.  Natalie got a little worried at this point, thinking we were going to get into trouble, but luckily, after much convincing she was able to calm down enough to go through security without us having to tell her the surprise.  Peter went first and told the security officer that they girls didn't know that they were going and to please help keep it a secret.  She did great!  She even made a comment that it must be difficult to have to say goodbye to Dad!  When it came time to board the airplane, we waited to be one of the last people on the plane, Peter went through the motions to say goodbye to the girls and boarded the plane.  At this point, both girls were in tears.  Peter stopped in the loading dock, waved for the girls to come to him.  They were so confused, they just looked at me.  I pulled out our tickets and told them that we were going to!  They were so shocked they were speechless!  The walked as if in a trance to the loading dock and didn't say a word until we took off.

We took an early flight, so when we got to California we'd have time to play.  We landed at 9:30 am and was in Disneyland by 11:30.  We would have been there by 11, but we walked from our hotel and got slightly turned around.  The first thing we did was ride on the pirate boat The Columbia.  After all that extra walking around, we needed a calm ride.  After that we wend and did Splash Mountain.  In retrospect, we probably should have done some smaller rides and work up to this because Alexis freaked out!  I was concerned that she wouldn't be willing to do other rides, I'm glad she did.  After that, we did some walking around, getting our bearings and caught the daily Mickey's Soundsational Parade by accident.  It was wonderful!  At that point, we had been in Disneyland for 5 hours.  After the early morning travels, the extra wandering just trying to get into the park, and all the walking around in the park, we were all exhausted!

Our second day in Disneyland was our long day, 12+ hours.  We rode many rides, visited many characters, saw a few shows (the favorite being the Star Wars Jedi Trainees show) and had a great day.  We got the Hopper pass so we were also able to go to California Adventure Park.  So we wandered over there and did a bunch of stuff over there.

The third day, was our most successful day by far.  We spent about 9 hours there, but we got in the most rides and characters that day.  We had breakfast with Minnie and friends that morning.  The girls LOVED that, especially Alexis.  We didn't buy the autograph books to get all character autographs, but we did buy the girls hats and they had Mickey and Minnie sign the bills.

One of the first rides we did on our last day, the third day, was the Pirates of the Caribbean.  That was an adventure!  We got through the ride, and were about the 5th boat back to unload when the ride broke down.  We were stuck on the ride for about 45 minutes and the Disneyland firefighters had to "rescue" us.  But they gave us two fast passes for any ride for the troubles.  So we got off the ride, grabbed a fast pass for another ride and then went and used those.

Over all we had a BLAST in Disneyland!  Our favorite rides were the Indiana Jones ride, Star Tours and the Thunder Mountain ride.  We rode each of those twice.  We never were able to convince Alexis to try Splash Mountain again, after she had a better idea what to expect.  I was bummed that they had Space Mountain closed down while we were there.

The rest of the week the girls and I were on our own for the majority of the time because Peter's conference started.  We spent a day with friends who had just recently moved down there, spent a lot of time in the pool, and just had a relaxing second half of the week.



Enjoy the pictures.  They are not in any particular order.  I apologize if there are some weird formatting issues, I tried to get it to fit properly....