California here we come!

During the summer of 2000 we both were working on our internships. We had decided that since Dan was graduating from college and I still had a year left we wanted to go on a road trip. We really wanted to do something fun and decided on a 10 day trip to California. We saved all our money from our internships and planned to spend time at Disneyland, Universal Studios, Medieval Times, and any fun things we saw along the way.
September finally came and we set out for one of the best road trips we have been on. We took I-5 straight to Disneyland. We drove all day and decided to rest in Sacramento. On our drive we were going through the farm land and saw a chain gang working in the fields. It was strange to us because we had never seen that before. After a quick rest and a yummy dinner at the Spaghetti Factory we finished our drive to Disneyland. We could hardly wait to go!

Disneyland 2000

Belle and I

We spent 5 days at Disneyland and had a blast. We went on a tour of the entire park and got to see and learn a lot of what goes on behind the scenes. To this day whenever we go we tell our kids about some of the fun facts and have them search for the hidden Mickeys throughout the park. I had set a goal to take a picture with every character that we saw and I managed to do it. I even got to see my favorite, Belle! We went on all the rides, saw a few of the shows, and we were so glad we were able to go.

Medieval Times

While we were in LA we wanted to do some other fun activities that we hadn't done before or that we wanted to do again. I had always wanted to go see The Price is Right, so, one day we got up extra early and stood in line forever with some annoying people. When finally we made it in we had so much fun watching. We didn't get called up to be a contestant but we had fun anyway.
When we were in high school, we went to California for a band competition and went to Medieval Times. We had such good memories that we wanted to go and do it again. Before the show we went to Ripley's Believe it or Not. That place has some really weird stuff in it. When we finished at Ripley's we went to Medieval Times and were sat in the Red and Yellow Knight's section. Our knight didn't win but we didn't care, we had fun and the food was delicious.

Universal Studio's

We both remember going to Universal Studio's with our families when we were kids. I remember the tram ride and freaking out when King Kong came out. To this day my family still makes fun of me. I was so scared I yelled "Get me out of here!" Well, I was going to redeem myself on this visit. We did do the tram ride but I remembered what side King Kong came out on so I secretly decided to sit on the opposite side. Although I didn't yell "Get me out of here!!", I did have flash backs to that nightmarish day in my childhood. We spent two days at Universal and did the whole park. We loved going on the Jurassic Park ride and had fun walking through the different sets. On the last day we were heading out of the park when we ran into Spider-man. Dan had just bought a cool cup and I said, "you have to take your picture with him and the cup". That picture is one of my favorite from the trip.

Dan and Spider-man

After all this fun it was time for us to start driving back. Before we went home we had planed on going to Six Flags. On our way there we found out that it was closed and we would have to wait a day to go to it. We couldn't believe it. Really, it's closed! Why does a theme park close during the week? Well, we found out that after school starts it is only open on certain days. So we made a quick decision and decided to head over to San Francisco and drive up Hwy 101. To our surprise there was a huge convention in San Francisco and all of the hotels were booked. Just our luck. We really wanted to see the town since we hadn't been there before, and went across the bridge to find a room over there. All the hotels except for one were completely booked. The hotel that wasn't booked look exactly like the Bates Motel!! I'm not kidding. It was so scary and ghetto looking we were actually afraid to sleep there. We had no choice and locked ourselves in and tried our best to sleep. As soon as the sun was up we left and went across the street to the Super 8, who let us take some of their brochures and told us all the great sites to see. When we told them where we had to sleep they felt so bad that they let us have some of their breakfast. San Francisco is a beautiful city and we did the pier area. We had fun going through the aquarium and walking the board walk. When we were done hanging out we had to continue our trek north.

Hwy 101 is a very scenic route. We loved the sunsets and all the beaches. We stopped as often as we could to walk the beach and have some fun. On one of the beaches there was a huge flock of seagulls and Dan could hardly contain himself from chasing after them and making them fly off. It was so funny watching the birds try and run from him.

We stopped at the Trees and Mystery and the Tillamook Cheese factory and had fun in Seaside as well. This trip was so much fun. We were so glad that we had the opportunity to take it and couldn't wait for the day that we would be able to do it again. In fact, last summer (2011) we did a similar road trip with our kids and they had fun seeing all the stuff that we had seen and done on this trip.