Disney Marathon

Every year Disney has a marathon where people run around the park for fun. I don't understand this. Don't people run around the park for fun every day?

Anyway, while I am not crazy enough to try to run a marathon, I felt like I ran a Disney marathon last week. Yes, I just got back from my 4th Disney trip this year, and it will go down as the hardest one yet. Let me just touch on a few highlights for you.

1.) Heather is in the middle of a high-risk pregnancy, but rather than miss out on Dland, she opted to use a wheelchair. We rented one before we left on the trip, both to save money and so we could take it between the hotel and the park, which we did. Repeatedly. Every day. Several times every day. I think I made 4-8 trips per day between those locations, and that doesn't count the distance within the park.

2.) I have realized another benefit of graduating. I have achieved an all-time low in my personal fitness. This was impossible while I was trucking 20 pounds of books around campus every day, and taking at least one PE class per semester, but now that I have a diploma it is my right to let myself go to pot. And I have. And I paid for it. While I realistically topped 6 miles per day, it felt like I walked 20+ miles per day, and after day 2 I was completely sore and it seems like I was sweating and breathing hard the entire trip. Now I have motivation for my next trip . . .

3.) One of my favorite things about DLand is that it is true family time. On our first visit we were worried about our kids standing in line and getting bored and whining, but it didn't happen. It was great.
Well, I don't know if Trenton is tired of vacations, or if it was the fact that he didn't get pushed around in a stroller the whole time, but he was horrendous. There was whining, crying, fits in every store and even a few bursts of anger. He had a tough time.

Now that I have glamorized all of the hard parts about this trip, let me just tell you that that trip was great. We still, after 14 days at Disneyland in the last year, haven't done everything there. I came with a more detailed plan than ever (because I know every attraction by now) and I planned in a few things we have never done, and we enjoyed all of them. My list of to-do's is already growing for our next trip in a couple of months (Heather will be staying home for this one) and I am looking forward to the whole thing. Some of the new experiences we had this time around were:

1.) Eating at the Plaza Inn. Actually we ended up doing this 3 times. I am a huge salad fan, and nothing beats a tough day of walking around than a cool, crisp garden salad, and they have them at the Plaza Inn for $3!!! And you can get bread sticks for a $1!! That is amazingly cheap for on-site food. The only other things you can buy for $3 are cotton candy or a churro. Even a deep-fried, sitting-in-a-warming-bin-all-day chimichanga is like $6. It was great to have a nice sit-down meal each day.

2.) Billy Hill and the Hillbillies. So maybe I like this fiddlin' hick show because in my heart of hearts I long to wear overalls to work everyday, but the show was only part of this successful event for us. We went during the heat of the day and got to enjoy a great meal of finger foods and root beer floats while being entertained by redneck comedy. You can't say that this isn't a super situation. And it was funny and the performers were way talented and they made fun of the birthday girl in the front row for half the show. Fantastic.

3.) Golden Dreams. OK, so this is pretty much a waste of space, but I wanted to do all the stuff I hadn't done before. They did have a cool special effect to open and close the show, so I give them points for that, but hopefully they come up with a better use for that cool theater soon.


So that is all I have to report on that. Enjoy the pics. I am working on another post which I actually hope will be useful. I am critiquing the many Disney web sites out there and making recommendations. Let me know if you have any favorites I should consider.

Mug shot or mugshot?

When I started this blog I claimed that it had a higher purpose than frivolous day-to-day updates of the mundane, but I am already breaking this rule. I am just posting a picture of myself with a beard for fun, because I am about to dispose of it (the beard, not the picture.) It has served its purpose having annoyed my parents, scratched my kids and alienated my wife. It is kind of like pushing your little brother just so they get mad and chase you around. Well, now the fun is over and it is time to undo all of those fun side affects and go back to life as usual . . .

Something Fun

At the beginning of the summer I promised the kids that I would fight against my urge to be a work-aholic father and that we would do "something fun" every week as a family. Logan has really latched on to this idea. Almost every day he asks, "Are we going to do something fun today?" Then we all have to remember if we have fulfilled the weekly goal or not. It has been a great experience.

So far we have gone to the theater, hiked, swam, partied with family, had game nights, had movie nights and played baseball. While I can honestly say that I have enjoyed every minute of it, I can not say that I would have had the discipline to put the other things in my life aside long enough to do these weekly activities without the promise and Logan's follow-through. Sad, isn't it?

So last Saturday it was 5:00 and we still hadn't done "Something Fun." Time was of the essence. We had talked about hiking to a local waterfall, but I only had a vague idea of where the trail even began, and it was supposed to be a decent length (2 miles). In the end I threw caution to the wind (I'm really good at that these days) and threw some bagels, a first aid kit and some water in a backpack and we all jumped in the van to go hiking, sans Heather of course. These days she isn't hiking anywhere. OK, honestly, she isn't hiking anywhere on any day. It isn't her thing.

So we went hiking for our family outing and Heather went to watch Hairspray with her mom. It works for us. It was 6 PM by the time we had begged our way past the ranger station and found the trail head. (I didn't have any cash to pay the $3 fee. Whoops.) As usual the boys were dancing around with excitement at the prospect of "doing something fun."

As we started out, we began to pass other hikers on the trail, all heading out, not in. More than one motherly hiker shook her head at me when they saw us just starting out with 4 year-old Trenton in tow. No less that three of these kind ladies took time to tell me that it was farther away than I thought. I thanked them for their generous words and told the boys to march faster.

Forty-five minutes in I started to get a little worried, and told myself that we would turn around if we didn't find the falls in the next thirty minutes. Logan, being both our leader and the clumsiest of the bunch, was starting to get tired and tripped and bumped into things regularly. He seemed to make progress down the trail by bouncing off of trees, rocks and other organic material (the trail was open for horses.)
At 55 minutes we finally saw the falls and in an hour flat we had completed the two mile hike in.

We rested on a big rock and ate our blueberry bagels before taking off our footwear and testing the stream at the base of the waterfall. There are some things in life that are near impossible to describe, and one of them is the ice-cold, yet refreshing feeling of melted snow running over your feet after a hike. Add in some pain from the jagged fragments of rock that lined the bottom of the stream and it made for a sweet-and-sour combination that you just can't get in any other way. It was great.
We spent about 30 minutes resting and playing in the water, and then I knew it was time to go. We hadn't been on the trail 10 minutes when Trenton announced that he just wanted to go home and lay down. The rest of the return trip was a struggle. It was a combination of stumbling, murmuring and coaxing, mingled with the sporadic discoveries little boys make. We had the opportunity to poke at several caterpillars, collect a single wildflower for Mom (yes, you may report me to the Forest Service or whoever for taking one flower) and acquire a cocoon to bring home and hatch in a jar.

The return trip took us 90 minutes, and it was pretty dark when we got back to the car, but we made it and we had a great time. I don't have any exciting news from this little outing. No one experienced any medical trauma, although Collin's arm is still broken of course, and it was uneventful. For us that is what made it a great trip, so I wanted to share it.