Vacation: Day number...oh heck, the rest of 'em.

Hard to keep up on posts what with all the fun and hi-jinx we were having. We really wished the weather had been warmer (we were promised 75 degrees!)

We did make it to Disneyland. Mickey gets a big gold star—I lost my cellphone. I realized it about an hour later. I back-tracked to the two previous rides and WOW it was waiting for me back at California Soarin’ where it had dropped out of my pocket during the ride!

Big thumbs up for TK. He measured up all day at exactly 40 inches, they would check him and then double check him, but every time he passed. He rode nearly everything! Thunder Mountain Railroad (didn’t want to do it again though), he loved Splash Mountain, and he even did Tower of Terror (I don’t like that one, he said after). And get this…we made the day WITHOUT a stroller! (had to rent a locker for lunch snacks & drinks @ $7) That was a new one for us, TK was a trooper and walked a ton &and dad was a bigger trooper and held him a ton!

She missed out on the big right and the Carousel was just not very fun, instead.

Big thumbs down cuz 7yold didn’t measure up for the big one Dad had been prepping her for. Even with 2 inch platform sandals she was still a finger width too short for California Screamin’. And mom swears we will not be back for a $400 date with Goofy and the gang Any. Time. Soon. Which is good, cuz she and TK will be tall enough for all the rides by then!

Oh, another thumbs down, we only saw Chip&Dale characters, nothing else. 7yold asked, ‘who are they?’. TK mixed ‘em up with the Chipmunks from the recent holiday movie.

Neutral on the weather. Not sunny, but not too cold (wore jackets the whole time) and even the tiny bit of rain didn’t bother us.

But HolyCowCrap(!) we were all so exhausted by the end of the long day (got up at 6AM, left at 7, didn’t get there til 9:30). Around 8PM we decided our last ride would be the new Nemo ride—looked to be half an hour wait (turns out that was longer than we had waited all day). But no. More like a full hour later we got to ride on the bizarre submarine/see-fake-sea-life/movie out tiny portholes. That’s one you only need to do once… And we turned down a reported 55 minute wait on Space Mountain for THAT?

It was a long ride back—but no traffic this time & all the kids slept including the mommy-kid. Again Dad’s a trooper with his 64 oz D.Coke in his lap, he got us back to our vacation villa safely…..

The next day we got back to sleeping in. There was a ‘Wii’ tournament in the clubhouse for the kids, and the girls pretty quickly opted to paint birdhouses instead, and soon Theo got in on it too.

We did get some good pool time, but the temperature was just not working out for us. We headed over to the Children’s Museum, and we didn’t expect much—but I think the kids liked it more than the pool….NOT LIKELY (I can hear them yelling!). And this was our one night to eat out somewhere nice-ish. We’d been reading about the local fave—Las Casuela’s chain. And it was good, not great, but the kids liked it. Very heavily photoshopped, these two. Just a tad too tan, eh?

On to Day 5. It was cold. And rainy. And did I mention cold?

We opted to drive up to the Palm Springs Tram. The guide says ‘it’s a can’t miss’. But honestly, it was 32 degrees at the top, and windy, and expensive. The kids enjoyed the view riding to the top but that’s about it. I’d say it was a big can miss (maybe it would be worth it during the heat of the summer instead…). On our way up the tram...

cold and windy, not a great combination

By the afternoon down below it was sunny and 65 degrees. NOT warm enough for the grown ups to get in the pool, but the kids finally seemed to ‘get it’. They left the parents alone to read & doze off, and they played fisherman and the shark game.

Later that day we stayed in for the late afternoon/evening. Wow it is so very cool having the extra bedroom space. The girls caught up on missed Disney Channel in the other room—gotta have Hannah on vacation! And TK wandered back and forth between the girls, me on the computer & Dad out cold on the couch (he had an early AM phone conference that morning poor chap).

Day 6.

Friends from San Diego came today—Yipee! Haven’t seen ‘em for going on 4 years. I’ll call them Sarah and Steve (in case they don’t want any publicity). They have a little girl who is my middle kid’s age. She is adopted from China. Sarah calls her their little spicy girl because she is from the Szechuan province. But I call her our little Chinese-Jewish girl, because Steve is Jewish. Christmas/Hanukkah at their house must be a ball! We’ve missed a lot of our friends from back East so it was unbelievably refreshing to catch up for a couple days with them.

In the end we did not make it to Joshua Tree National Park (since the tram was such a fiasco-too cold and the kids just didn’t appreciate it) we’ll just have to save it for the next time. I’m bummed though, I really hoped to get some great pictures of the desert landscape. And wasn’t that the deal? I agreed to drag off to Disneyland for a day, and they agreed to behave at the boring National Parks I wanted to see??

Anyway, Steve and Sarah brought homemade Lasagna and Apple Pie! They can stay with us ANY time.

Last full day.

All 8 of us took off for Indian Canyon for a hike in the desert. (Another one of those ‘musts’ from the guide book-but not such a long drive like Joshua Tree) And this time it SERIOUSLY paid off. Absolutely georgeous. Gigantic native palm trees that made you feel like you were in some sort of ancient forest. (see more photos here.)

Our friends, aren't they handsome?

Goodbye to the cool trail.

We maybe hiked ¾ of a mile but we took our time and due to the rain the previous day the small stream nearby was sort of large and at one point the trail crossed the stream and we had two choices. Turn back. Or well, Steve had already taken off his shoes and was all the way across before we could properly work out our two choices! So we all schlepped across the stream barefoot!

Almost as good as the beautiful trail, was lunch at ‘IN-AND-OUT Burger’. We attempted to do the pool later, but it never really warmed up enough, plenty of sun, but not enough mercury. The rest of the evening we relaxed (okay I flat fell asleep), and Sarah went out and bought steaks, which she then grilled for our dinner (like I said, they can stay with us anytime!). We had been eating frozen food and cold cereal before they got in. By then the weather reports were showing a brilliant storm coming through and warning people not to drive on the expected ‘treacherous I-15 corridor’ (their exact words). So we booked a room in a hotel in St. George, we figured if it didn’t pan out we could cancel before we got there, right?

Last Day, or so we thought.

There wasn’t much in the way of weather all the way to Las Vegas, lots of wind though. We called a neighbor back home and she said, ‘well… the rain stopped’. The rain? Is this a serious storm or not? At a truck stop in Primm (don’t even ask what the toilets were like) there was a weather report and they were echoing the same story—treacherous on the roads, stay off them? We decided not to risk it, would have put us home around midnight at best, and we decided we were too tired anyway. One more night in St. George. We had to scramble to take care of all the things normally lined up on a Monday in our ordinary life and then drove in around noon. (Fifth grader still made it to her orthodontist appointment, and while she did not need a new retainer—hers had broken—she ended up getting the ghastly tongue thruster off(!) Wahoo No More Lisping!)