Weekend in Disney

After returning home from Vermont, I had to make good on a promise that I made back in June to my boys — so we packed up and heading down to Disneyland.  For Nathan and Kenny, this was their first time down at Disneyland.  In fact, for Nathan, it was his first time on an airplane.  And what I found was that Nathan likes to fly.  He thought it all was a big race and that when we took off, we were racing all the other planes at the airport down to Disneyland.  Pretty funny.

Oct. 11th

This was our first day to see the Mouse and everyone was excited, which you might be able to see from this picture.

The first thing that we did in Disneyland was head to Toon Town.  This is where Mickey “lives” and has lots of little places for the boys to play.  There we saw and did lots of fun stuff, like ride on the Gadget roller coaster, Roger Rabbits spinning cab rides and look at all the little houses.  The boys also took some time to play on the little cars.

We were actually just about ready to leave Toon Town when someone dropped by to say hi…Pluto!  When Nathan saw Pluto he decided that he wanted to give him a hug.

and then Kenny…

followed quickly by Goofy and Minny

The rest of the day was spent riding rides.  We rode lots of kids rides (the tea cups, story time, the Mad Hatter, etc), some not so kids rides (Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain) and those in between (Star Tours).  The funny thing is that Nathan is my little dare devil.  On Thunder Mountain, he was sitting besides me yelling faster, faster while the train ran down the mountain and would have rode it again and again had the line not been so long.  Pretty funny.  And the Buzz Light Year ride, that was a favorite because you got to have ray guns and shoot at the bad guys.  We kept trying to see who could score the most points.  I like the Buzz light year ride as well, at least, up to the point where I broke my digital camera.  I’d set it down on the floor and it got pinched between between the console and shattered the led screen.  Dandy.  Fortunately, it still takes pictures — I just can’t see any of them which will mean that I’ll likely be taking lots of duplicate pictures over the next few days to make sure that some of the pictures that I’m taking are getting saved correctly.

Anyway — that’s pretty much day one.  I have a few more pictures (prior to shattering the screen), so here are a few from the rest of the day.

Oct. 12

On the second day, we thought we would try to do a few of the rides in Disneyland that we had missed and then go over to California Adventures and see what that park had to offer.  In general, we were holding off on the California theme park in part, because a number of the rides that I know that Nathan would like to ride, he’d be too small for.  And he was so proud of being a big boy, that I didn’t want to disappoint him.

So on to the day.  We went over to Disneyland and the first ride that we tried to get on was Nemo, but I swear, the lines there are just crazy — and I can’t figure out why.  Since we didn’t want to stand in line for an hour for Nemo, we went looking for other fun.  To start, we went on the Buzz Light Year ride again, followed by a ride on Star Tours.  Kenny really like Star Tours, so that one was for him.  Then, while walking over towards Splash Mountain to get a fast pass, we saw that Space Mountain was pretty much wide open.  Not surprisingly, Nathan was game for a ride on the roller coaster…Kenny was a little unsure and Alyce was ready to give it a go.  After the ride, Nathan was ready to go again, Alyce was walking around on wobbly legs and Kenny told me that he never wanted to ride on Space Mountain again.  🙂  But I was impressed that everyone was willing to ride it with me — because I’d long since given up hope that I’d get anyone to ride Space Mountain with me.  My little thrill seeker and I rode on Splash Mountain one more time, and then we grabbed some lunch before going to California Adventures. 

At California Adventures, we did a lot of rides just for Nathan — and that was partly because Nathan got jipped out of one of the rides.  They have this ride called the Grizzly Run — which pretty much is a ride where you just get wet.  Nathan really wanted to ride it, but you have to be 42 inches so he was just too short.  He was really disappointed, but was a champ about it.  And because of that, we road a lot of other kids rides and then stayed for the pixar parade.  After the parade, we went back to Disneyland to ride on Thunder Mountain one more time (I’d promised Nathan) and then we headed back to the hotel.  Overall, I think that everyone had a great time so it was definitely worth the trip.  Anyway, here are a bunch of pictures from our second day.

 
Kenny after riding the Grizzly Mountain

–TR