Our Disneyland Adventure!

I am very late in posting about our Disneyland trip, but it's a bit intimidating to actually try to summarize it and I keep putting it off! But I realize if I don't write something now, I will forget a ton!

Bottom line: we had an AMAZING time. Amanda loved it just as much as we thought she would. We have a great video of her seeing Sleeping Beauty's castle for the first time...will have to try to pull it off as a short clip and post it. Everyone who sees it says it should be a Disneyland commercial! That first sighting of the castle is so magical.

Our flight down was pretty uneventful...we had a pretty short layover in San Francisco, but the second leg was taking off one gate over from where our first leg arrived, so there wasn't any stress involved. The luggage all made it (a big relief, since I was worried about all the Sam paraphernalia that we'd have to go out and buy if it didn't!) . We caught the shuttle bus from LAX without any problems. It was actually kind of funny...it was after 9:30 pm by the time we got on the bus, and I guess that isn't prime arrival time for Disneyland tourists! So we got on the bus and we were literally the only people on it aside from the driver. The four of us in a bus that holds around 100! Amanda thought it was quite funny. The kids were both exhausted and fell asleep on the bus ride so it was quite peaceful. I admit to getting a little teary-eyed when we actually arrived; it felt quite magical having two sleeping babes in our arms and arriving at Disneyland at last!



Hotel was OK...nothing special but it was very close to the main gate and we got a deluxe room for free with our Visa points, so no complaints. It had a nice pool, and we had planned to try to swim every day as a break in the middle of the day, but we only made it once – just too many things to try to fit in at the parks!

The trip back home was a lot more stressful. We were flying through SeaTac on two different airlines. At LAX, the Alaska rep told us he could tag our luggage through to Vancouver, but he couldn't give us boarding passes for the second leg of our flight - we would have to go back out to the main check-in counter in Seattle and go back through security. This had us a little bit worried as we only had 1.5 hours in Seattle, but we figured it would be OK. That was until our first flight was delayed by well over an hour. Ack! I spent some time on the phone to Air Canada trying to figure out what to do, and they confirmed that we – all four of us – needed to exit and go back through security. Also, they told us that the flight was the last one of the evening so if we missed it we would have to stay in Seattle overnight or pay for a flight on another airline. We figured it was a lost cause, but decided to give it our best try to make the second flight, even though by the time we got off the plane in SeaTac it was 15 minutes until departure in a different terminal! Jeff ran ahead to the gate (which required a trip on a subway to get to the terminal) to see if they could help us, and I followed behind with both kids and the rest of our carry-on luggage...no small feat! I was amazed to get to the gate and find out that Jeff had gotten us on the plane! The gate staff acted like it was no issue at all, which meant if we had been on time and gone out and back through security it would have been a total waste of time. Oh well, lesson learned for next time – always go to the gate first! The bad news was our luggage didn't make it on the flight, but it was delivered the next afternoon so it all turned out OK in the end. Phew!

I will summarize our actual Disney adventures in a few separate posts...going to try to recap what we managed to see in our three days at the parks!