Meeting Mickey-Part 2

Whew! It's been a whirlwind the last few weeks. But I'm happy to say that our kitchen is put back to rights, we had a blast camping with family and we even got to go on an extended date up in San Francisco (of which I have no pics because I forgot our camera) last Friday. Since I've been on very limited blogging, I've got a lot to catch up on.

I wanted to say some other things about our fabulous trip to Disneyland though that ended up making our trip great. The first thing was that we had extra adults with us. If you have really little ones who can't ride the bigger rides, then it makes it difficult to get on any big rides with the older kids who are tall enough because an adult has to ride with each one. We weren't sure what our older boys would think about the big rides but they ended up riding them all and loving them. Who knew?

We also utilized the Fast Pass/Parent Swap strategy. Now I married a mathy and so the wheels of his brain started turning and he quickly figured out how to maximize our ride power with the Parent Swap strategy. The truth of the matter is this...if we would've had to wait two hours in line to get on Space Mountain, we just plain wouldn't have done it. But with a Fastpass, you come back at your appointed time and are on the ride in less than fifteen minutes. Yet you are limited to one Fastpass every two hours on each ticket you have. So this took a little finagling.

Early on the second day we discovered that Disney offers a Parent Swap option. What it means is this: if one parent has to stay with small children, the other parent waits in line (or shows up with his fastpass), tells the ride attendant he wants to do a parent swap; then he gets a pass, rides the ride and then goes and gets his spouse (or anyone, a grandparent, uncle, friend, etc..) who gets right on the ride without waiting. And with the Parent Swap option, Steve discovered that you really can get two Fastpasses for the "price" of one. It's like a tongue-twister...Fastpass, Parent Swap...Does that even make sense? It didn't totally make sense to me but, it seemed to work every time. What it equaled was more big ride opportunities for everybody.

You never know what your older kids will want to ride. We didn't think ours (who aren't very old) would want anything to do with the roller coasters. But they loved them. They loved all of them except they didn't care for Space Mountain-which was the first one they rode. Luckily that didn't ruin it for them. It really could've gone either way. Yet after that, Splash Mountain, Star Tours, Big Thunder Mountain railroad...they were game. So like I said, you never really know.

What do you think? You think they liked Space Mountain? Ha ha ha! They said it was way too fast for them. I think they didn't like it that it was so dark. By the way, this is all my family in one car...both of my brothers, my brother's girlfriend, Steve, myself and my Dad. My mom and sister-in-law were with the little ones. This picture totally cracks me up!!

So having extra adults around, utilizing the Parent Swap and maximizing the Fastpass made it possible for us to still get a lot of bang for our buck when it came to rides. The kids did a lot of other rides too like Autopia, the Rockets, the Merry Go Round, Pirates of the Caribbean, Buzz Light Year and other littler rides. All in all, the thrill of Disneyland did not disappoint and it was a magical time for all...including all of us grown-ups who really are just kids at heart. It's hard not to be nostalgic about such a beautiful, happy and fun place. I'm thankful we got to visit this summer and look forward to more trips in the future!