Our final day. My final 'vacation' blog post I promise. :)
Actually, our day started when we went to a Disney hotel for a breakfast reservation we had with Mickey and friends. It was at Paradise Pier Hotel..at the PCH Grill. The theme there was a surf theme, so all the characters were dressed as such.
When we first walked in, we must've just timed it just right. The first stop as they called us for our table was a photo op with Mickey. However, apparently every 20 minutes or so Mickey and some of the other friends go up on stage calling for volunteers to go dance. Since Brooke and Brenna had just walked up (for their picture moment), he just grabbed their hands and took them up on stage. And they went! And danced! (again, soooo not my children)
The video is much cuter of them dancing...
Here's one more video of them performing their dance on stage...
So, anyway, after the dance was over, we went back and took the picture with Mickey.
Then, we were seated at our table. The breakfast was a buffet type with some really delicious food! They had a separate kids buffet, complete with Mickey Mouse shaped pancakes. The kids loved it. But I have to admit, they were also almost too excited (by all the characters) to eat much.
We were visited by Pluto (again, the kids always loved Pluto..he was so silly), notice how Brenna is laying on his nose? haha.
We had to track down Daisy a bit (she wasn't as friendly <.< )...
Then Minnie came by...
Towards the end of our breakfast, they were doing another dance, and this time Brooke ASKED to go up and dance. This time it was with Stitch (from Lilo and Stitch)...
Then she got one last pic with Mickey (this was a really good Mickey!) before we left.
From that hotel, we went and parked near the entrance of DownTown Disney (we should've parked at the hotel and shuttled again, but we were antsy to get inside the park, so we ended up paying a little more). From there, we rode the monorail into the park.
The monorail let us off near the entrance to the Autopia ride, where you 'drive' the cars (they are hooked to a track). Here is Brooke and Brenna beforehand with their Autopia driver's licenses...
I rode with Brooke, Brad with Brenna. They both loved it. Brooke especially. She was cracking up thinking she was really bumping me around. :)
From there, we went and watched a Jedi Training Academy, where they let little kids come up and fight Darth Vador after learning some Jedi fighting tactics. I asked Brooke if she wanted to do that, but she didn't want to. So we just watched the others.
After that we used our Fast Pass option again and rode the Buzz Lightyear ride. You rode in this little car thing and shot the bad guys from Evil Emperor Zurg. It was fun too!
Eventually time for another nap for Brenna.. this time she was used to this sleeping in the stroller stuff and decided to get comfortable! Haha!
While she napped, Brad and Brooke rode Dumbo again.
Then Brooke and I rode the teacups again.
From there, we went on to find more of the park that we hadn't even seen yet. While walking into Frontierland, we saw Pocahontas.
Then we rode on the Mark Twain Riverboat around seeing the park from yet another view.
Then we walked over to Critter Country and found Winnie the Pooh and friends.
And then we rode Winnie the Pooh's ride through his dreams. I was a little shocked often enough to find a lot of these little rides were actually kinda scary. Also, Pinnochio's ride was a little scary too. The girls handled it fine, but I can't imagine all kids would be ok with the darkness and the eeriness of it all. **shrugs** I don't know.
We also walked through New Orleans (it was just as packed with people as I assume the real streets of New Orleans would be)
We saw Princess Tiana (from Princess and the Frog), which the girls could care less about (they've never seen that movie...I've heard it was a tad scary). She was a very good singer though!
We also saw the Haunted Mansion. Needless to say we didn't tour that. ;) Though Brooke wanted to!
Then we walked back to the castle and explored it. We went into the Bippity Boppity Bootique as well, but didn't buy anything. ;)
The girls then rode King Arthur's Carousel.
And tried to pull the sword from the stone.
By then, our time was drawing to a close. We still had not seen Donald Duck at all. :( And had been told he was a hard one to find. We also hadn't seen Belle (from Beauty and the Beast), so we thought we'd spend our last little bit of time going back to the Princess Fantasy Faire to take our chance on if Belle would be there or not. And if not, the girls were still always thrilled to see a Princess anyway, whoever it ended up being. Brooke, though, was really wanting to see Belle (I think that's her current favorite princess). Here she is peeking to see which princesses are there.
Our turn was up next and they had, once again just rotated princesses. We saw Snow White again...
And Sleeping Beauty again..
And BELLE! It was BELLE!!!
Actually, I made friends with the employee who was working the line, who hooked us up with a Belle meeting. He stalled us, let a few others go in front of us, so we were first in line to see Belle. They really aren't supposed to do this, but he was very nice about it. :)
And Belle was great also. She signed both frames and our book and talked to Brenna for a good 5-10 minutes about her friends and The Beast and more. They really are so much into their characters and Brenna talked her ear off! It was so cute!
Then, it was definitely getting late. We caught the tail end of the Street Party parade. This time we didn't get up front to dance (it was the same parade as the day before), but Brenna decided to dance from afar.
We rode the teacups one last time...and this time we went fast per Brooke's request. :)
And then we parked ourselves on the sidewalk to eat our dinner and save our spot for the Fireworks show, which happened at 9:00pm. Again, they have room for improvement on this front. Everyone squished together, only to be squished a little more. Plus now, it was dark, so it made me very nervous of losing our kids! Ok, not really...but sort of! Especially when they turned out the street lights right before the fireworks began. Anyway, but thanks to Shannon, we had light up ears for the kids! So we could always locate them. :) We even had a couple people stop to ask us where we got the ears.
Remember I said the World of Color was one of THE most awesome shows? Well, the fireworks was the other most awesome show. I think it was most awesome because of the music, the Tinkerbell flying in (on a zipline) and starting the fireworks...just like in the beginning of the Disney movies and just the atmosphere. Again, magical.
The pictures aren't as good, but here's videos (and it looks like we are really far away for some reason, but really we were VERY close, as close as we could be I think)...
And the grand finale...awesome!...
From there, Brenna fell asleep on the walk over to Fantasmic, the last show (on the river where we had previously ridden the riverboat) that started at 10:30pm. Again, the amount of people (and this was a slow day for Disneyland) was incredible. They didn't allow people to stand on the street at all. I found a place to the side and made Brad leave us so I could say I was 'waiting for my husband.' But they finally were about to get snooty with me making me get off the sidewalk. Arg. But just then, Brad found a seat in the back.
This show wasn't quite as good. Again, it was a bit scary. The idea is that its Mickey fighting good vs evil in his dreams. He's on the tip of the island on the river and the different characters come through on a float or boat or through laser lights, etc. Maybe cuz we couldn't see or get the full effect or whatever... we just weren't impressed. But here's a couple of pictures from that show (I couldn't even get good pictures of the boats/floats/laser show)
But I'm glad we went and saw it just for the sake of knowing, but if we go again, we probably wouldn't waste our time or effort on that show.
Not to mention, it was 11:30 when that was over! The park closed at midnight, so we made our way to the exit. We stopped for one last, on-the-way-out picture (taken at 11:50p, don't the kids still look surprisingly happy? we had to wake Brenna up for the picture though)...
And said goodbye to Disneyland. It was rather sad having to leave. :( We walked back through DownTown Disney (to get to our car this time), went into the humongous Disney store one last time to get a couple last minute souvenirs.
Brenna quickly fell back asleep in the stroller (we woke her up for that one last picture in Disneyland) while we walked to the car, but Brooke was still going strong!
We went straight to bed that night (or early morning however you wanna look at it), because in the morning, we had to get up sort of early (about 8a) to drive to San Diego to catch our flight back home. Brad and I stayed up late packing, then Saturday we got up kinda early (everyone was still happy! this is a pic taken outside of the front of our condo - The Dolphin's Cove - before we left)
We drove to San Diego, checked in our rental car and got shuttled to the airport. Only to find out that our flight had been delayed by 2 hours. Ugh. I was counting on the girls sleeping on the flight, but I stressed over how to keep them awake for almost 3 hrs in the airport when they were sooo sleepy so they WOULD sleep on the plane.
But it worked. We pulled out colors and coloring books and food and more. They were really fabulous this whole trip. All the flying, the driving, the traffic, the late nights, the early mornings, the short power naps... and they still were perfectly behaved. I know. Pick your jaw up off the floor now. I'm not sure why they were such perfect little travellers. They never have been before. They hate riding in the car, don't sleep and get bored easily, which leads to frustration and crying, etc. But this trip, they were so great! I'm sure it helped that I enabled Mobile HotSpot on my phone, which allowed us to use the iPad WiFi connection through my phone to stream Netflix movies (Instant Queue) while in the car. But even with that, you still expect some breakdowns. And we had none. I can't remember anyone crying or having any fits. There were no fights between them, nothing. Maybe they were just in vacation mode. I don't know. But I didn't mention it at all while we were there in fear of jinxing ourselves. We kept seeing other kids bawling their eyes out or screaming at Disneyland or the zoo or where ever else, secretly thinking to ourselves, 'whew, glad that's not us!' but not wanting to say anything just in case it was about to be us! But it never was. They were fabulous! And I promise I will remember that when they frustrate me next time at home. ;)
Anyway, so we finally boarded our plane. They did sleep, on their new Pluto PillowPets (they wanted PillowPets for Christmas and we came across Pluto ones which they just don't sell everywhere, so we spoiled them a bit there..they were the same price as regular PillowPets).
We arrived in Austin, then still had to eat and drive home. We stopped at a McD's and were overjoyed to only pay $12.42 for dinner instead of the $43 we were accustomed to (theme park food is pricey as you know!). The girls stayed awake the rest of the ride home (again, fabulous!) while watching a movie. We got home close to midnight and all's well that ends well.
We had a fabulous trip! Thanks to Sammy for all her help so we could pull this off. The girls had an absolute blast. Brooke STILL is wanting to show everyone her pictures. (I did a little album for her to take to school and share, etc) Brenna still talks about her favorite experiences as well. And Brad and I have labelled it as THE best trip either of us have ever had as well. Most of the time when you are on the way home from a vacation, you are kinda ready to be home. Not this time. We were all sad it was over. It was that great of a trip. :)
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