California girl for a week! Part 1: the beginning
There is nothing like touching down at LAX, seeing the trademark arched restaurant, the palm trees, the smog and the shuttle buses to Disneyland. I’ve done this like fifteen times before, but it never fails to make me happy, and last week, that is exactly what I needed. A little California love.
It was a torrential downpour when we left Vancouver, which only made 25 degrees and sunny all the more fantastic upon touchdown. The Avis lady successfully upsold us to a silver Mustang convertible (oh my God, that was a hard decision! The whole conversation went something like this: “Want to drive a convertible? The upgrade is chea-” *Interrupted* “We’ll take it”) and soon we were cruising down I-5, top down, Beach Boys blaring at an obnoxious, of-course-we’re-tourists-and-loving-it level. There’s something about a convertible ‘Stang (we named her Sally, natch) that just makes you feel free, and I found myself looking at the other convertibles we passed as if we were bonded, we had admission into the special club of convertible people. These strangers were our new peeps.
Soon we checked into our nicely renovated room at the Red Lion Anaheim, applied the sunscreen we should have put on our pasty Canadian skin before renting a convertible (oops), and headed to the Block at Orange for a little first day of vacation retail therapy, dinner and a movie. I just have to go on record thanking AMC cinemas for having arm rests in their theatres that lift up, so if there’s no one next to you you can pop up all the arm rests and actually get comfortable. Such a small touch, but it rocks. So much so that I enjoyed that more than the movie 
The next day it was onto Disneyland. If you’ve read my blog before (and if you haven’t shame on you! Lol) you know I’m kinda sorta really obsessed with Disneyland worldwide. It’s my crack, the addiction I just can’t shake, and if I’m ever within 200 miles of one, you know I’m there. I’ve been to this park something like 20 times, but the second I enter that central plaza and can hear the Disney classics being piped in over the sound system, a stupid grin affixes itself onto my face and I’m Disnified all over again. My friend had never been here before, so I kept lapsing into tour guide mode, spouting useless facts and planning a route for optimal rideage, before snapping out of it and just letting him enjoy the experience. I had never been here for the Holiday versions of the Haunted Mansion and Space Mountain before and I was really surprised at how large a change they are. I had always assumed they just left the ride the same and threw in some Nightmare Before Christmas/ghostly decor and called it re-themed, but it’s actually a totally new ride experience. The Haunted Mansion specifically. The new decor was all-encompassing, the storyline was totally different, the colours were brighter and the overall effect was actually much less creepy than the usual ride. It was really noticeable near the beginning, when you’re in the stretching room, and normally lightning flashes and you see the hanging corpse above you. But the holiday version had the same lightning, only accompanied by the not creepy at all smiling face of Jack Skellington. The Space Mountain:Ghost Galaxy retheme was a little more on the spooky side, with giant projections of space ghosts where the planets normally are, and because the planets are not illuminated, the entire ride experience is darker. This makes it feel much faster, though the ride itself has not changed at all.
The following day was all Disney, too. Giddy fun in the warm California sun. It was hot this day, and mid afternoon we hit up the shops to buy all the breakables (4 mugs between the 2 of us, but they were so cute, we couldn’t resist) and stuff we hadn’t wanted to carry on the rides (a stuffed Yoda will now provide me guidance from the top of my bookshelf) before going back to the hotel. While my friend slept off the heat, I took my hyper self shopping at the nearby Anaheim Gardenwalk mall. I know it was 230pm on a Monday, but this area is full of people on vacation, so there was no reason for the mall to be a ghost town. There were like ten shoppers in the whole place, and most of the people in the halls were employees walking off their boredom. I couldn’t believe it. Granted, there really aren’t any flagship stores, unless you like the over-perfumed yuppie clothes of Hollister, and it was too early for the good selection of restaurants to be busy, but still. It was almost uncomfortable being there. So I went to Sephora in downtown Disney. I always got to Sephora in Downtown Disney. At this point they should just see me coming and greet me at the door with a little basket and my favorite flavour of iced tea. A girl can dream… But I spent my money like a good shopper, then went back to the hotel, picked up my friend and we headed back to Disney to hit the California Adventure Park.
I always describe this park to clients as a good way to spend an afternoon if the lines at Disneyland get too long. There just simply isn’t too much there, and consequently the lines are usually short. Now it’s also massively under construction, as Disney has realized this and they’re in the process of building a big-ticket Little Mermaid Ride, a park, and a whole new Cars Land, complete with giant prefab mountains that were just beginning to take shape. When this park matures, it’ll be great, but for now all you have to do is make sure you ride Soaring over California and spend some time lost in Disney wonderment at the Animation Studio and you can leave fulfilled. They have just launched a new World of Colour show that’s supposed to be spectacular, combining projections, lasers and thousands of dancing fountains, but the fastpasses were sold out by the time we got there, and neither of us were willing to start lining up three hours early in order to get a good seat. That’s precious Disney time wasted. So maybe next time… I’ve never seen the Fantasmic show in Disneyland, either, for the exact same reason.
Day three brought a last-minute road trip down to San Diego. The plan was to enjoy the two hour dive each way with the top down, wind in our hair, but the weather had other plans. Overcast with a high of 19 degrees meant that it was top up, hoodie on, but the ride was till enjoyable. We spent the day at the world-famous San Diego Zoo, and I can’t recommend this place enough. It’s got more species in one place than pretty much any zoo on the planet, it’s nicely landscaped, so you feel like you’re exploring the pathways instead of just walking down pre-fab roads, and it has great gift shops. What’s not to love? We saw everything and took the majority of our vacation pics that day…