We do not know how to pack light.
We're letting the excitement get to us. Can you tell?
It's time to get down to business. We're leaving NOW!
I'm not joking when I said I was back up at 1 a.m. The goal was to be out on the road at 2:30 a.m. and not a moment later. We did pretty good for ourselves, we had the car all loaded and were officially on 680 at 2:30 exactly. Heck, that put us ahead of schedule if you wanted to get technical about it. But what is there really to say about the drive from Northern California along I-5 to Southern California.
It's very boring.
It's very long.
Luckily, we managed to stay awake.
We did pass the time with a lot (and I do mean a lot) of music. I do believe the final playlist that we made had over 9 hours of songs on it and we proudly sang along with every one that came on. But what would a road trip be without a classic? Sometime around 4 a.m. Andrea decided it was the perfect time to start randomly singing "99 Bottles of Beer". Classy, right? I still think we should have found a way to incorporate something Disney into it, like those delicious Disneyland Mint Juleps our mouths had been watering over for in anticipation for months. I hope that you feel very privileged, because I am going to share with you the video that we made, capturing the final 87 bottles of beer. Well, at the very least you should be glad that we didn't start it all over again once we hit zero.
And if by some miracle you actually watched all 9 1/2 minutes, you must be insane. Or bored.
And while I'm sitting here sharing video, why not share this one as well? It is the whole reason we took the Flip camcorder in the first place. The only time I ever find the drive along I-5 somewhat pretty is when the sun is still rising. Otherwise it's enough to put me to sleep, almost literally.
The sad part is that, unlike our experience back in March, we actually hit traffic in L.A. It was depressing, but it has to be expected, right? I was starting to get worried that we would never make it to our hotel of choice in time to check in, stow our luggage, and walk along Harbor Blvd. to the parks before the gates opened. But in the end it all worked out.
We did manage to get to our hotel of choice, the Howard Johnson Plaza Hotel, in decent time. In fact it only ended up taking us 6 1/2 hours to get there, so it was only just after 9 a.m. when I checked us in to find that our room was already ready to go. That was some great news! We could actually take our luggage to our room, lock away some of the important valuables (like my laptop) and do a little refreshing before heading over to the park. It really helped in Andrea's case because somehow the totally awesome sequin lanyards that we found weren't as awesome as we would have liked. We noticed that she had a line of purple along her neck, and shirt. Bah-humbug!
The HoJo as we like to call it.
And a couple of photos of our room:
Coming up: We enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and Fantasy!!
