March 4, 2008

Tuesday, March 4, 2008 8:30 PM

Happy Birthday Mom!

The kids really enjoyed a Scooby Doo movie Dallin bought

Wow.  Too much has happened to catch up on tonight but I’ll at least get started.  The hard drive on the other computer crashed or rather got corrupted some how.  I was afraid that I had lost the data including this journal however I was able to pay Fry’s $150 to do what they called data recovery.  I was unsuccessful with my tries to simply put the hard drive in an external enclosure.  I also bought another external hard drive for backups. I have plenty of space for backups now I just need to get the details and discipline of my new system worked out in short order.  Getting a backup system in place was high on my list but I had been putting it off until after vacation.  It is after vacation now so I guess we’ll get started.  I am glad that the crash didn’t cause more damage than it did.

As much fun as the City Pass was it is a big sense of relief to be done with it.  All in all we did three days of Disney Land, a day at Universal Studios, a day at the San Diego Zoo and a day at Sea World.  I can’t really say which was my favorite I enjoyed all of them.  The zoo is definitely the place I want to go back to the most because it left the most unseen.  The San Diego Zoo needs more than a single day to be properly explored.  The fact that Anheizer Busch owns Sea World really dampened my appreciation for the place but overall I was very impressed with Sea World and can say I like almost all of what they represent.  We were able to enjoy short lines in almost all of our activities confirming that February was indeed a good time to hit things.  A mistake we made was that it turns out many schools in California get the entire week of Presidents’ Day off.  The extra people out of school swelled the lines a little but the rain dampened them so all in all it came out about the same as the next week which had perfectly sunny weather but no holiday.  Actually I think the sunny day may have been even busier than the holiday.  By our third day at Disney Land we felt very comfortable there and were able to make good use of the fast passes.  Ty was particularly lucky in that the ride he chose to go on “Space Mountain” shut down right at the end of our ride so we wound up getting a couple of extra fast passes.  The luck also of course extends to the fact that we didn’t encounter any negative effects of what ever it was that caused the operators to shut down the ride.

Ty and Dallin watch Flamingos at SeaWorld.

The kids were able to feed the sea lions at SeaWorld

We were able to pet the dolphins at SeaWorld.

Natalyn was very suprised to get so wet at the Shamu show.

The sea lion show at SeaWorld was great!

If you stood at the bottom of the Journey to Atlantis ride you could get a pretty good soaking.  I was the only one who went on the ride but the kids all got wet from it.  Davey got a little more water than he expected but eventually cheered up.

There was a really cute pet show where they had dozens of dogs and cats doing different tricks.

The dolphin show may have been my favorite in terms of it just being amazing how much the dolphins could do.  I had forgotten or never knew prior to SeaWorld that a dolphin could jump 16 feet out of the water.

This is a picture of our campsite at the Mission Bay RV Park in San Diego.

The Gorilla exhibit was quite something at the San Diego Zoo.

The zoo had a very neat rain forest walk.

The bird arboritums were amazing.

The kids had fun at the kids park in the zoo.  There wasn't much there but that is part of being a kid, it doesn't take much.

There was a wonderful amimal show.

We had lunch at the top of the tram.

We took a tour on the top floor of a two story bus.

The zoo had a great sea lion show.

There was a tram that would take us from one side of the zoo to the other.  Given the choice I think the kids would have spent their day at the zoo on the tram.

The polar bear display may have been my and Lexie's favorite part of the zoo trip.

We had an extra treat in that we were able to see a baby panda at the zoo.

It was neat to see the Panda's

Dallin started the day taking notes about the animals he was seeing. 

The entrance to the zoo has impresive elephant hedges.

 

David would have been in the previous picture but he ran off. Tigger proved to be a faster runner and caught him.  David loved playing with Tigger.

There was about an hour wait for the Finding Nemo ride.

We all live in a yellow submarine ... At least we lived in the line for one for quite a while.  The Nemo ride was by far our longest wait at DisneyLand but it proved to be well worth the wait, once.

This is Whoville at Universal Studios.

I think we all know this guy.

This is where they shoot a lot of flood scenes like the one in Evan Almighty.

The studio tour included an impressive flash flood.

The kids were a bit nervous about the studio tour.

Fortunately I was able to grab him in the nick of time.

Natalyn was amazingly shy around Dora.

Curious George wouldn't let Davey go by without saying hi.  We think it is very likely there was a nice little grandma in the Curious George costume.

This picture was taken for the benifeit of my brother in law Mike. When we saw a store dedicated to Raiders garbage we thought he would be impressed.  Many people suffer from mental conditions much more severe and debilitating than being a Raiders fan (aka Cowboy's fans). I thought it inocent enough to tribute the insanity.

Hollywood here we come!

 

We had a great evening a Newport Beach.  We had been intending to go to Huntington Beach but missed a turn on the way.  We were thrilled with Newport as it was.  The water was too cold to be comfortable but it was still fun to run in and out with the tide.  David took on the responsibility of chasing the seagulls away from our food.  He was quite good at it and seemed to have a lot of fun doing it.  I was surprised to learn that one doesn’t need a fishing license to fish off a man made structure such as a pier.  I want to get that from a more official source but it might be fun to try fishing some time.

You'll want to get the full view of this one to see Natalyn's expression.  I don't know what she was thinking but she was expressive.

Sand mom? WHERE?

Natalyn is showing us what she got for her Birthday.  The thing in her hand is from a kid's meal at the zoo.

Disneyland wore out the kids and the parents.

This simple rocket ride was one of the kids favorites.

Natalyn loved tea cups.  I actually have a video of our ride on this.  I took it mostly to participate in the sin of bad home video. If you find yourself in need of motion sickness e-mail me and I'll give you a link.

There was a fun little place to bang on things.

Once the kids found bumper cars we were in a loop lock for quite a while.  I am not sure how long we were there but it was plently long for me and not nearly long enough for the kids.  California traffic more than fills my need for this sort of thing.

The boys claimed they were not scared on the kiddy coaster.  Photographic evidence really is a bugger huh guys?

Are we having fun?

I believe the Buzz Lightyear ride was the kids overall favorite.  The ride allowed you to get shoot "laser" guns at targets to collect points through the ride.

Ty was feeling the power after some heavy duty laser blasting.

I really resonated with the "Year of a Million Dreams" theme at Disneyland because this feels like my dream year.

We had a wonderful campsite just a mile from the entrance to Disneyland.