Disneyland: The Happiest Place on Earth

Last summer Allen and I went to a timeshare presentation. We resisted their enticing sales pitch and received a free vacation. Well... it wasn't quite free, but it was pretty cheap. So Allen skipped school, I wrote three days of sub plans, and skipped out on Parent Teacher Conferences and we were off to California.

Here we are so excited to be at Disneyland!

We can hardly wait!

This pictures is for our nephew Matthew. He loves "cachow"!

This was Allen's first time on the tower of terror.

We are holding on for dear life.

The Toy Story Ride: By far my favorite ride.

It is a pretty new ride and it was the longest line we

waited in... only 30 minutes. Most other lines

were only a 5 to 10 minutes wait. Go to Disneyland

in January or February!

My friend Laura Richardson Jones and I grew up together. Two days before we left we found out that she was going to be at Disneyland the same day we were so we made plans to see each other. We spend the morning in California Adventure with her cute little family.

The classic initial pose: C is for Cameo... not California

A is for Allen

Oh man... we love Disneyland so much. I probably don't love it as much as my sister-in-law Kristen... but I love it!

Allen's favorite ride is the Jungle Cruise. In fact, this is the only ride we went on twice. He loves it because of all the cheesy jokes. This is his favorite: "Looks like we are coming up on a lovely sandstone rock... Some people take it for granite."

Apparently those tea cups were spinning too much... I missed the mark.

We didn't' get a picture with Mickey, but we got to wear his ears. Allen and I decided that Disneyland is the one of the only places that you can just be a kid. If grown adults were to wear a goofy hat or mickey ears anywhere else they would be ridiculed...but at Disneyland it's awesome and all part of the experience. But we are cheap so we just try them on at the store, take a picture and that is our experience.

While we were in S. California, we also went to Hollywood. Here we are at Grauman's Chinese Theatre with Captain Jack Sparrow. We actually tricked Captain Jack, but we didn't do it on purpose. He offered to take a picture with us and we didn't know you were supposed to pay him so we said yes. Afterwards when he asked if we could tip him, we said oh no thanks. Then he took the camera... looked at the picture and said "looks good" and gave back the picture. We are pretty sure he was trying to delete the picture but couldn't figure it out so he gave it back. Sorry captain Jack.

We also went to the LA temple with my best friend Brynn.

We love you Brynn and we love the temple!

We had a wonderful time... even with a scare which actually turned out to be a miracle. We rented a car while we were there through BYU because BYU waives any underage fees. But when we got there they said they couldn't waive the fee and they were not accepting our one free day rental coupon. So the price was doubled what we thought it was going to be. Then they asked us if we wanted their car insurance and we decided we have given them enough of our money and passed but we were very cautious when we were driving in LA. Well we made it the whole trip without getting hit. Or so we thought. When Allen went to go load up the car, he found some scratches on our back bumper. It looked as though someone had scraped the car while backing up and then ran. The 45 minute drive to the rental place was pretty stressful just because we didn't know how much it was going to cost. We called our insurance company, but they couldn't look at our policy unless we filed the claim so we decided to wait till we got to the rental car place. When we got there, they saw the scrape, they took us into the office. They started entering it into the computer and they said that it was already entered into the computer. Allen is pretty sure it wasn't there before, but okay. Then we called our BYU agent to check on the underage coverage and the rental car man took our word for it. Then our coupon worked so the price was right where we thought it would be. It was a miracle. It was a blessing to save the money, but it was more of a blessing because we were able to enjoy our day with Brynn and attend the temple with the right spirt.

Thank you World Mark for making our February Vacation possible.