Nigel and John enjoyed a dream-come-true kind of weekend as they did a mini road trip to Mt. Airy, NC.
travel
Costa Rica 2019
At 3:30AM Stewart and I drove to pick up some other travelers and got over to the airport for their early morning flights to Costa Rica.
During their time there, Stewart’s team hosted a VBS for children in both Carpio and Pavos during their short, two-week, summer break. The played games, prepared and served hot lunches, and with the help of translators, told the kids about Jesus and His love and the gift of salvation.
Stewart and Justyn stayed with a host mom who made safe breakfasts and dinners for Stewart.
They had one overnight debriefing on the west coast and got to swim in the Pacific Ocean. Some of the local team from the local church also got to go. This is Ariel and Stewart messing around. He’s not playing Santa Claus.
And this is Stewart providing his mom with a good laugh from thousands of miles away…
dork.
I picked them up in Buffalo at 1 something A.M….
He was home by 3:30AM and his alarm went off at 5:30AM for work.
Lucille Ball Museum and Jamestown
After we broke camp we headed 40 minutes southwest into Jamestown to visit the Lucille Ball Museum and Desilu Studios.
This was the reason we’d picked this region and it was worth the trip.
The two buildings are a short walk from one another in beautiful downtown Jamestown. If you are a Lucy fan, it did NOT disappoint.
I took very few photos as I was really enjoying the displays and reading the signs.
The full studio replica was amazing. It was life sized. Ohh how I wanted to go in and play in it!
Old scripts and cameras and equipment.
I was so impressed with the work ethic of these two. Desi Arnez had major directing interests and helped to design equipment to work to meet his vision for the live broadcasts.
This is a model of how they had the live studio.
After a few hours in the museums we walked to a yummy pizza place.
and then headed over to the Comedy Museum.
The comedy museum would never have gotten us to the region on its own. They offered a bulk pass to the two. The technology used in the museum is cutting edge and very impressive. The CONTENT – being comedy focused – is entirely too crass for my tastes. We enjoyed what worked for us and left the rest. What we did enjoy was cool. Like I said, it was technologically VERY engaging.
We headed home where we unpacked from camp and ate the rest of the premade food I’d had for camping. And we slept well in our own beds!
Marie and Tori
I learned my lesson by from not taking enough still images yesterday. OY.
Marie and I left for Toronto around 10:30AM. The drive was a little stressful and there was snow…
We were on the “14th” floor of the hotel. The room was lovely – no photos – oy.
We did get to use the hot tub.
We did a little walking around and it was cold. And there wasn’t really anything open in the “entertainment district” for us to do, so we watched HGTV and chilled in the room and went out again at dinner time.
I’d found somewhere to eat just across the street from the Roy Thomson Hall where Tori Kelly would be singing later.
Marie had fish tacos and I had a mushroom and beef pot pie. I was definitely doing the Brit thing. It was delicious.
We ate this desert which they called Big Ben and we called amazing.
Tori Kelly has the voice of an angel.
We are in the nosebleed seats… But it was still great.
Marie and Tori
I learned my lesson by from not taking enough still images yesterday. OY.
Marie and I left for Toronto around 10:30AM. The drive was a little stressful and there was snow…
We were on the “14th” floor of the hotel. The room was lovely – no photos – oy.
We did get to use the hot tub.
We did a little walking around and it was cold. And there wasn’t really anything open in the “entertainment district” for us to do, so we watched HGTV and chilled in the room and went out again at dinner time.
I’d found somewhere to eat just across the street from the Roy Thomson Hall where Tori Kelly would be singing later.
Marie had fish tacos and I had a mushroom and beef pot pie. I was definitely doing the Brit thing. It was delicious.
We ate this desert which they called Big Ben and we called amazing.
Tori Kelly has the voice of an angel.
We are in the nosebleed seats… But it was still great.
Road Trip Catch-Up: Making tracks
We rose early on June 20 and started snaking our way back east and north through Southern California, Nevada, and lots and lots of Utah.
We took a quick zip through Las Vegas, with emphasis neither on the work quick, or zip. It had changed remarkably since my last visit 18 years ago, and it was every bit as congested as you can imagine. While I had thought it would be fun to show the kids the colossal hotels with vivid theming, we were all hard pressed to actually even see the monstrous hotels. Two decades ago, these resorts stood deep off the strip with lots of room take in the opulence. Now, the once-open spaces before the hotels were jam-packed with every business imaginable and entertained all the traffic that would go along with that.
We found some snacks near the north end of the old strip, filled up with gas, and moved on through the endless dessert.
You may not believe my van could actually move that quickly…
We finally arrived to the south west region of the Great Salt Lake, and found ourselves a Dickey’s BBQ Pit that had NOT run out of food.
We ate every morsel. Well, maybe not the nasty “ice cream” that they offer.
We checked into the Staybridge Suites with an indoor playground and made the most of it. The water was too cold, and the hot tub was too hot. The kids enjoyed it.
Road Trip Catch–Up: Last Day in Cali
June 19th, 2018
As mentioned before, our family somehow failed to see the great logic in adding a day to our 4-day Disney passes for only $10/person. (It’s still killing me two months later. Move on, Stacy; move on.)
So what exciting thing did we do instead?
If you guessed nothing, you’d be absolutely correct.
Wait – we did throw out food, pack clothes, and John took the six kids to see “The Incredibles” – which almost cost the same as adding a Disney day would have cost.
After they got home, we took one last run to Downtown Disney
I will certainly miss this California sky.
We ate lots of leftovers and headed to bed early.
All good things must come to an end.
Last Disney Day
Well –the title of the post gives it away, but when the day dawned, I thought it would be our second-to-last Disney day. This is not going to be an easy entry to type… but here goes.
I made a list of what we had not yet done at the two parks and it certainly seemed like we had enough room to spend two more days there.
Our morning routine was down to a science by now, and I no longer fretted about not being first in line for rope drop.
As a matter of fact, this morning they let us all in early, and had us queue up near the castle and did official rope drop from inside.
We were so well positioned we easily could have ridden Peter Pan again without a wait, except that the lead walker in our party Got Confused and –just like that- our window of opportunity shut and it remained a one-Pan-trip.
We broke into two groups, and my group hit up a number of Fantasyland rides without waits.
The girls and John ended up getting off Dumbo one ride cycle before Nan and I . And from the air I could see my family getting this cool interaction with Captain Hook. Katriel especially has a fascination with Captain Hook. Thankfully, John whipped out his phone and recorded this encounter.
We turned around to go over to Storybook Canal for another ride, when we saw this group out together. I have never experienced anything like this before. They stayed out and played for such a long time that WE ended up walking away before they did.
We rode the Casey Jr. Train (which was adorable – and LONG).
The view from the train was pretty. The park was still empty and had the fresh morning feel.
We did a few more rides in that area, and we met up again with Marie and headed over to queue for Moana. She is the only Disney princess we had never met before. There was some confusion after talking with a cast member and we were actually lined up in the wrong spot. We figured it out and headed to the proper spot, just around the corner. Three young women were already in line. They said that they had seen us where we’d been queuing and knew we’d been there before they arrived and offered us the head spots in line. Now – there were NO other people there, so it most definitely wasn’t necessary to insure that we’d meet Moana, but it was very kind. We ended up chatting with these three sisters from Northern California and before the princess ever arrived Katriel was hugging them like they were her new friends.
Moana was late. Like, by 10 minutes. She arrived in a bit of a rush, but fully in character. The girls liked her a lot.
We found the boys and headed over to DCA.
I honestly can’t say exactly what we did each bit of the day, but we chipped away at our list bit by bit. And the boys were definitely teeming with signs of having entered the “age of unbelief.”
By lunch time they were lobbying to NOT return the next day.
We rode Guardians a few more times, and John and the younger girls did Radiator Springs Racers again. We had some cool meet and greets with Marvel characters, and missed others in what would amount to my biggest regrets of the trip.
We watched the full Frozen show, which was outstanding, and the little girls enjoyed some of Bugs Land with Nan.
We did Turtle Talk with Crush, and visited Sorcerer’s Workshop.
Everyone but mom and Nan watched the first 15 minutes of The Incredibles 2 in the theater.
We had a neat (but time consuming) lunch where we ate from different restaurants on the Pacific Wharf section of the park. John spent almost an hour going back to the van to collect a wire for me to recharge my phone with.
We finally got to ride the Monsters, Inc. ride as a family.
Having gotten to see all three of the nighttime entertainment offerings, we’d decided as a family that the one we most wanted to enjoy again was Fantasmic. John had gotten us FastPasses in the morning, so we left DCA around dinner time having done a lot, but not having “done it all” and I will say there was an undercurrent of stress. Some people were in better moods than others and some people were showing more grace than others, and that’s all I’m going to say.
We went back to Disneyland for dinner and had another knock-it-out-of-the-park meal. This one was at Red Rose Taverne, and it was so good that Nigel quipped, “I’d come back here tomorrow just to eat this again.”
But – actually – this was the time of the night we had to decide if we were going to turn our four day tickets into five day tickets. The boys really didn’t want to come back, and Nan was tired. We opted not to turn them into five day tickets, and as I type this a full month later I can tell you I regret it as much now as I did a month ago. Three thousand miles away from home and we didn’t add a day. It was stupid.
We enjoyed Fantasmic one more time, as well as another ride or two.
And we headed to our van, saying Goodbye to Disneyland resort.
Hollywood Boulevard and Santa Monica Pier
To say we moved SLOWLY this morning would be an epic understatement. Laundry, dishes, and mid-vacation inertia made us very late to get out the door…
This may not have been as big a deal were we not entering into some of the worst traffic in the country.
We made it to Hollywood Boulevard and headed to the lot more or less under TCL Chinese Theater (once Mann’s).
We did not venture out to the Hollywood sign, but were satisfied to see it from a distance.
How apropos that the first star we saw was Mickey Mouse’s.
We walked for blocks in multiple directions, trying in vain to use phone-accessed websites for directions to the stars we most wanted to see. For the most part, only Nigel was on a quest to find some of his favorite stars from decades gone by.
Robin Williams
Harrison Ford
Sylvester Stallone
Tim Conway
Chris Pratt
Winnie the Pooh
Ron Howard
Rod Serling
Poor Gamora…
Samuel L. Jackson (do you see the Marvel theme???)
CHUCK NORRIS!
Stan Lee… NOW you see the Marvel theme. (The little girls know him from Big Hero 6.)
ELVIS!
Don Knotts.
Marie?
Snoopy
Someone named Nancy Kelly – so it was just funny.
Scarlett Johansson.
We could not locate Andy Griffith – Nigel’s favorite. By the time we had a command of the website we were using, we realized we had gotten extremely close at the far end of our walk, but turned back east before we’d hit it.
We found a playground for lunch.
And headed to the Santa Monica Pier.
The Pier itself was a little dicey… but not super sketchy. Finding this sign was my main goal.
Some of the kids expressed their dislike for the idea of donning swimwear and going to the beach. The beach WAS fairly packed. The little girls and Tab were all over the idea, so Mama pushed it just a bit but donning her own suit.
Soon the others reluctantly put theirs on…
And no one regretted it.
We had such a nice time. As I mentioned, the beach was pretty crowded, but that didn’t make it unpleasant. Nan mostly stayed sand-side and the little girls made friends with some kids next to them. There was a lot of frolicking, and we stayed until after 4:30 P.M.
I made a terrible suggestion…. I thought it would be easy to just wear our suits back. It was only about 40 miles back to our house, where we could have changed properly…
Except – TRAFFIC.
No sooner did we start driving did my map app share the bad news.
When the driving gets tough, the tough get pizza.
We stopped at a neighborhood pool club and used their scummy bathrooms to change. Then we found a little neighborhood Pizza Hut in a tiny strip mall and the super nice employee, David, helped us find some great deals available when you order online, which I did from my phone.
We finally got back to our house around 7:30 PM.
Dayspring Disciples 