lewis and clark had a journal. you, beth-annie, have a diary.

Sunday, November 23, 2008
Trip-o-logue. Day seven. Disneyland.

A jaunt to Disneyland wasn't initially in our plans for this vacation, but as Ava started to develop a fondness for quite a few Disney characters we decided to add that to our itinerary. Neither Josh nor I had ever been to a Disney park, so this was a first for all of us. Since our hotel was close enough, we walked to the gate and saved ourselves the $12 parking fee (and it might have taken just about as long to get from the parking area to the gate anyway, from what I hear).

No, we didn't get our picture taken in front of Sleeping Beauty's castle. We didn't feel like waiting in line for a cast member to do it for us, and the Josh-holding-the camera-out-in-front-of-us thing never seems to work too well (not since Ava's in the mix, anyway).

Since we had only one day there, we wanted to make the most of our time, so first off we made a bee-line for Dumbo -- I'd heard the lines for that could get long, even in the off-season (which it was). Ava got a ride with each of us on that one by us each standing in line separately (with some space in between) and passing her off from one to the other.

The teacup ride (technically the "Mad Tea Party," but who actually calls it that?) we only rode once, because it wasn't exactly Mommy or Daddy's... wait for it... cup of tea. Ava was often impatient for the rides to start once we got on, and sometimes also while waiting in line, especially if we'd been on the ride already and she knew what it was. [Video: Yes, we were turning the cup the wrong way. I blame Ava -- she started to, and we just followed. :-)]

After riding Alice in Wonderland, Storybook Land Canal Boats (not as interesting as the description sounded), and child-swapping Ava for the Matterhorn Bobsleds, we headed to Mickey's Toontown, which was the coolest-looking of all the "lands." We got in line to ride Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin, and after walking through the mostly-empty but long queue were informed that it had broken down and we should try coming back a bit later. Lucky for us, after we left we ran smack into Minnie on the street and got ourselves a picture with her. Of course, Ava's looking at Minnie rather than the camera. Doesn't make for a perfect photo, but can you blame her? It's Minnie! With each character we met, Ava repeatedly pointed them out by name as we waited our turn. I wasn't sure how she'd react to them, exactly, but she never seemed scared of any of them -- just cautiously excited. So, no hugs, but no shying away, either.

After we met Minnie, we went to her house. And Ava sat on one of her chairs. And pointed at something.

Next to Minnie's house was Mickey's house, which illustrates the cartoonish architectural style of all of Toontown.

Ava and Daddy hang in Mickey's doorway.

Everything in the houses was made of this molded plastivinyl stuff. Ava liked finding things she could sit on. :-)

Once you were out of Mickey's actual house, you were on your way to meet the mouse himself, and there was more fun stuff along the way. Luckily everything was very kid-friendly to touch, because Ava was very interested in doing that.

"You go riiiiight... here. Good bag."

This looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book to me.

Apparently Mickey had a marching band performance to get to after he was done meeting us.

Ava fell asleep around lunchtime (we actually had to stop and get lunch for her separately later), and the grown-ups took advantage of naptime to head to some of the big-kid rides. Which brings me to my personal favorite: Space Mountain. It was awesome. And I only rode it once. D'oh. I regret not going back for another time (but there was only so much time in the day). We also rode Star Tours (which was... okay), Indiana Jones (much better -- and I believe the only ride where we actually used FastPass), and the Jungle Cruise and Pirates of the Caribbean with Ava. I wasn't prepared for just how long Pirates was (about 15 minutes), and we were surprised both that Ava didn't get at all restless in the boat and didn't get scared by anything on that ride. In fact, I think she would have liked to ride it again, but we didn't have time. (Oh, and we also found out that Splash Mountain, which I was really looking forward to riding, had broken down. Nooo!!)

The ride we went on the most times (because Ava kept asking for it again each time we got off, and there was no line) was Winnie the Pooh. This was Josh's attempt at capturing some of the vibrant scenes in there.

The last character we met was Pooh -- and we just barely got in line before they closed it off for the day. Once again, she's looking at the character -- and in this case, grabbing his arm as well. :-) After Pooh, we decided to check Splash Mountain before we left that area of the park -- and it was open! And, because it was both the end of the day and it hadn't been operating earlier, we didn't really have to wait at all to ride it (separately, of course).

We had to walk all the way across the park to get to the last ride we wanted to hit (the new Finding Nemo ride, which aside from Indiana Jones was our longest wait of the day), and managed to get across the parade route that cut through the center of the park just before the beginning of the parade hit. We stopped and watched a bit, though since we were late arriving couldn't see very well over the crowd. This is the Beauty and the Beast float.

Ava could actually see better than we could.

She's kind of hard to see, but that's Ariel in front of the castle. The parade was as close as Ava got the any of the Disney heroines she loves -- we didn't know how much she'd actually recognize them as... them, since they're actual people who can't look exactly like the characters like Pooh and Mickey can, and that combined with the fact that we would have had to wait a bit to meet them when we were short on time helped us make that decision. (She didn't really know she was missing them anyway.)

I liked this funky sculpture on top of one of the kiddie rides in Tomorrowland (basically like a rocketship version of Dumbo).

With the exception of Ava's Mickey/Minnie ears which we bought earlier in the day, most of our shopping was done as the park was closing (and actually in the hour or so the shops are open after the ride lines close). This picture is of Main Street, where we hit several shops on our way out. I got a couple of Christmas tree ornaments and magnets (my souvenirs of choice), and we got a couple of fun things for Ava, including the special funky-straw Mickey cup she used at her birthday party. One disappointment for me: I didn't find here, or anywhere else on our trip, for that matter, any pint glasses to add to my collection (which includes Universal Orlando, Cubs, Cyclones, etc.). They must not be in style right now. Boo.

The Disneyland gate area is a huge open space with Disneyland on one side and Disney's California Adventure (a much newer park) on the other. I kind of love the design of the Californa Adventure entrance. We would have liked to have gone there, too, but this was mainly a San Diego trip, not a Disney one. Maybe someday.

Because I forgot to take a picture of the entrance in the morning.

A sleepy, sleepy girl in a sleepy, sleepy bed.

beth, 8:38 PM || We are 14 comments. Read us!

Saturday, November 22, 2008
Back to happy things

like this.

josh, 3:30 PM || I want to be a comment. Post me!

Friday, November 21, 2008
ABC = dead-to-me. Plus! -- a BONUS dead-to-me!

In one fell swoop, ABC just canceled three shows I watch. "Dirty Sexy Money" was okay, and I'll be fine without it. I'm sadder about "Eli Stone," which was actually a very good show and, I thought, really starting to hit its stride in its sophomore season. But I'm devastated about "Pushing Daisies." I adored that show with every fiber of my being, and to know that it will be no more is heartbreaking. It was vivid and lush. It was sweet. It was different. So, of course, it was canceled.

This is yet another nail in the coffin of quality in mainstream entertainment. This after the Sirius-XM merger a couple of weeks ago finished stripping satellite radio of all but a few shreds of the uniqueness XM had when we first subscribed several years ago. One favorite station dropped. Then another. Then another. And, hey, let's add a few more Top 40 stations in their place. Now they've even taken away our annual few weeks of odd Christmas hilarity that was "Special XMas." Because heaven forbid we should let anything unique or creative or varied stay on the airwaves. So go ahead, play the same songs and artists over and over again, and please try to stick mainly to the hits, because we haven't heard those enough already. Replace all the interesting shows with procedural repeats -- and don't forget to order more crappy reality shows. Just be prepared to lose customers.

Pardon my tone. I'm pissed.

beth, 1:19 PM || We are 5 comments. Read us!

Two companies.

One does something bad (notice anything missing?)
One does something good (notice anything yummy?)

I plan to cease patronizing the first company in the next few days (whenever I get around to it).
I plan to continue to patronize the second company.

Also, it's official.

josh, 10:06 AM || We are 2 comments. Read us!

Tuesday, November 18, 2008
2.

We celebrated Ava's 2nd birthday the weekend after, with both sets of grandparents and her Aunt Sarah. It was another low-key family celebration, and it was perfect for Ava.

Ava's Mickey/Minnie ears from Disneyland provided the perfect birthday hat this year.

We got her a bunch of balloons (Mickey and friends and Disney Princesses among them), and she loved them -- even more than we thought she would.

She loved pulling them down and making them "jump." It was nice that the ribbons were long enough that she could easily reach them even when they were against the ceiling. [Video]

"Look, it's Mickey, and Goofy, and Donald..."

I love how you can tell she's smiling even though you can't see her mouth. ;-)

They kept her entertained for quite a while. Quite. A while.

She was very happy to watch a couple of her favorite YouTube videos (I think this one was "The Batty Bat" from Sesame Street -- she loves the Count).

No surprise, she went for the big Sesame Street bag first (hey, not everything could be Mickey). :-)

Ava loves stickers. She doesn't always know exactly what she wants to do with them, but she loves them.

She also loved all the Cinderella and other princess stuff she got (she's such a girly girl -- though she also loves cars and trains and other things that "go").

Modeling her new Ariel cap.

She had a lot of hugs for "Big Minnie," as she now calls her -- so as not to be confused with "Little Minnie," who she already had.

She wanted to play with most things right away.

Ava's cake, made with love by Mommy. Who used almost an entire bottle of black food coloring in the frosting to get it that color. :-P

Hmmm... something's missing here...

...there she is! We only lit the birthday candle for a few seconds (after we sang "Happy Birthday"), because she's a little scared of flames right now (and doesn't really know how to blow yet, anyway).

Black frosting-face. She actually didn't get nearly as messy eating her cake as we thought she would (which is why we took her shirt off). I think she's looking up at one of her balloons again. (Incidentally, over two weeks later they're all still on the ceiling. Amazing.)

beth, 9:42 PM || We are 2 comments. Read us!

Thursday, November 13, 2008
Trip-o-logue. Day six. Loma and La Jolla.

On Wednesday we spent a few hours at Cabrillo National Monument on Point Loma, got Ava some beach time in La Jolla, and drove up to Anaheim in preparation for the next day at Disneyland.

Cabrillo National Monument marks the spot where in 1542 Portuguese explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo became the first European to land on the west coast of what would become the United States.

One of the best things about the monument is the gorgeous, rugged shoreline.

Daddy held on tight to Ava's hand on the paths, and Ava held on tight to Elmo.

Wow. This is one of my favorite things about California.

Surfing is huge in San Diego, and there were quite a few surfers out off the coast.

I wish I could say I took these impressive shots, but, alas, they're Josh's. It's ridiculous what these guys can do.

I love the starkness of the rock against the frothy softness of the water.

There's a great tidepool area there, where you can see things like starfish, shells, hermit crabs, sea urchins, etc. that are left in little pools after the tide goes out -- if the tide's low enough, that is. Which it wasn't during the day the time of year/month we were there.

But there was still enough of an area for us to walk around on the rocks and find a few interesting things.

Most of what we saw were these little snails. (It's kind of the same color as the rock I'm holding, so you might have to look at the larger version to really be able to see it.)

The snails were everywhere along the base of the cliff.

Ava seemed happiest when she was able to get her feet wet. (She was very unhappy earlier when she could see the water from up higher but couldn't touch it. She kept crying that she wanted to "go a beach!" We found the way down to the water just in time.)

She didn't mind her shorts getting a little wet, either.

After we somehow got her out of the water, she practiced her climbing skills under Daddy's watchful eye.

We drove up to the high point of Point Loma, where the views were even more spectacular that they were by the cliffs. The shore in the background is the island of Coronado, and on the right you can see curvature of the Coronado Bridge. On the left is part of the San Diego skyline, and underneath that in the midground is a statue of Juan Cabrillo. The left side (in the picture) of the island of Coronado is a Naval Air Station, and you can clearly see where that part ends and the residential part begins.

Close-up (as it were) of the Coronado Bridge.

The Old Point Loma Lighthouse has been out of service for over a century, but is preserved as part of the National Monument.

The original lens.

The inside of the lighthouse is now a museum of 19th-century lighthouse keeper life. This is a recreation of a bedroom on the upper floor.

We caught this Naval ship on its way to or from port (if that's even what it's called in the Navy). You can see how big it is in comparison to the sailboat.

The Cabrillo statue, down the hill a bit from the lighthouse.

After we got Ava a stamp for her National Parks Passport Book at the visitor center, we drove up to La Jolla for lunch. I had heard about a place called Harry's Coffee Shop that was a favorite with the locals. We caught them just before they closed and had some breakfast for lunch (as that seems to be their specialty). I was trying to take photos of everywhere we ate on our trip (just so we could remember), but this photo actually turned out to be fantastic in and of itself.

After lunch we hit the beach at La Jolla Shores (plenty of free parking on a weekday afternoon). Other than the fact that there was a lot of seaweed on the beach, it was an idyllic California setting, with rows of palm trees and a large grassy area on the other side of the boardwalk from the beach, plus views of the jutting coast in the distance. Overall, very nice.

Ava couldn't wait to change into her swimsuit and go catch some waves.

After some standing holding onto Ava in the waves, Mommy tries sitting down for a while to save her back a little.

Then Daddy does the standing thing. She was more than happy to just stand there forever and let the waves crash over her (well, not literally over her :-P). She loved saying "big waaaave!"

I hopped out of the car to get this shot on our way up a hill in La Jolla after we left the beach.

After driving up to Anaheim, this is where we ate supper. I've eaten at the Cheesecake Factory before, but either my memory's off or they weren't anywhere near this fancy. We had to wait for a table even though it was 8:30pm (and this wasn't even the high tourist season -- and was a weeknight).

They are very good at the aesthetics, those Cheesecake Factorians. They're also very good at the food-making. It's not the cheapest eat in the world, but for a chain, the food is very good -- even if making a decision off the ginormous menu with everything under the sun isn't the easiest.

Want to know what a $48 hotel room within walking distance of Disneyland looks like? This. Not too shabby. :-D

Ava, dear, I think someone's hiding in your hood. :-) (In her hand is a bar of soap she found and unwrapped, by the way.)

beth, 3:22 PM || We are 5 comments. Read us!

Thursday, November 6, 2008
Tuesday was NOT an historic day

Despite all the news people and pundits claiming that Tuesday was "an historic day," they are all very, very wrong.

It was a historic day. The "h" is not silent; therefore "a" is appropriate instead of "an." Just a pet peeve of mine.

And while I'm at it, "homage" is pronounced HAUM-idg, not oh-MAHZH. You can also pronounce it without the h at the beginning, but don't pronounce it like it's French. It ain't.

josh, 3:52 PM || We are 7 comments. Read us!

Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Trip-o-logue. Day Five. Africa and Animals.

Tuesday was San Diego Wild Animal Park day. And with that, let's just commence with the photos.

This was our first view upon entering the park -- not exactly what I expected. I thought it was all a sunny, open expanse. Not so. They also had these wonderful fine mists over the walkways at certain points, as the park is out a ways from the city, closer to the hot desert than to the cool ocean breezes found in San Diego.

Okay, so a lot of the park actually is that big, open expanse. And we got a fantabulous view of it from a terrace area at the end of the path we took toward the tram tour. You actually had to take an elevator down from here to the area you see in this picture.

Not a bad family portrait, even though you can't see the landscape behind us as well as I'd hoped.

They had this (too expensive for our taste) balloon ride you could take. It only went straight up and down on a tether, but it did actually go pretty high. It's either going up or down here. (The terrace we were on in the previous photos is on the right, with the red umbrellas.)

The Journey into Africa tram tour was included with our tickets, so we decided to do that pretty much first thing and have the rest of the time to explore the park at our leisure.

Lion on a jeep. BIG lion. This was taken from the tram just before we left for our tour, and I didn't realize until later that the jeep was part of the lion habitat -- they don't actually let them just lounge around on park vehicles. :-)

This was pretty typical of the kinds of things we saw on the tram tour. Some animals were closer up (like these ostriches), some farther away. It was nice to see animals in something more resembling their natural environments than they are in traditional zoos.

Rhinos are a lot bigger than they look. (Though we weren't quite as close to these as it appears -- we were using our telephoto lens, which I've dubbed "zoom-zoom." :-))

It was very nice of this pelican to give me a perfect profile shot.

Fence or no fence, that is one beautiful animal.

When they aren't lounging by the water, the rhinos enjoy a nice roam along the hillside. I get the impression we were lucky to get four of them all in one shot. In the background you can see one of the roads the trams drive along.

After we were done with the tour, our first stop was to see the giraffes close-up. And did we ever.

A mommy and her young'uns? Not sure. (Actually, since they only have one calf at a time, I'm guessing the plural of that at least is wrong.)

I've never been able to see such detail before. Really amazing.

I saw a few animals here I'd never seen before in person, and this is one: a California Condor. The Wild Animal Park was instrumental in the effort to keep these extremely rare birds (at one point there were only 22 living) from becoming extinct. Now there are more than 300, though less than half of those are in the wild.

Who needs a balloon ride to have great views?

Like I said, we were in a bit of a desert.

This is Josh's nifty handiwork with a slow shutter speed.

All together now: "Awwww..." A bitty elephant playing with a ball is always a crowd pleaser. :-)

Desert = hot. It wasn't ridiculously hot, but it was certainly quite warm -- warm enough to enjoy a lovely beverage from time to time.

Probably Ava's second-favorite part of the park (first-favorite is still to come) was the Conservation Carousel, also included with admission. Since there weren't many people there on a Tuesday in September, we were able to just stay on the carousel and ride it a few times in a row. That still wasn't enough for Ava's liking, but with the park closing at 4pm, we didn't have a ton of time to spend on any one thing.

I'm not sure what kind of animal this is, exactly, but it sure is stretchy.

File this one also in the "animals I've never seen" file: cheetahs. You have to pay a lot for the privelege of seeing them run, but this was still cool.

This is the paw of a sleeping lion cub. I swear, it almost looks fake.

There were quite a few lion cubs out at once (six, maybe?), but no adults this time (they keep them separated so they don't, you know, kill each other).

And here we would have Ava's favorite, the water play area for kids. We did this last so she could have fun there until we needed to leave.

She didn't like the bigger sprays, but preferred the low, controlled spout on the alligator. There were bigger, more rambunctious kids playing more in the other areas, anyway.

The one stop we made after we left the park was the Mission San Diego de Alcala. It wasn't actually open, but I think missions are beautiful, so I still got a couple of pictures of the outside.

This was on the side of the mission. I love this one.

We had to have one good Mexican meal while we were in San Diego, so we went to Old Town and ate at Cafe Coyote, which we'd heard was supposed to be good. It was, too. Yummy homemade tortillas.

Our home away from home, the La Quinta Mission Valley. This was our last night here before we drove up to Anaheim.

Our hotel pool, all pretty at night. (We only used it once -- the ocean was more fun.)

This was Ava's bed configuration at the hotel, an air mattress we brought sandwiched between the two beds. Worked great.

beth, 5:14 PM || We are 5 comments. Read us!