Disneyland Bound

On Monday we left on a three day journey to Disneyland.  I will admit that if we were to assign value to our time, it probably isn't worth it but we do save some money and if you consider the hotel time as part of your holiday it can still be a lot of fun. This year we were travelling with Kerry's brother Corey and his family. Our first destination was Medford. It's about an 11 hour drive and it means we've got about half the trip out of the way on the first day. We left at 4:30a and arrived in the mid afternoon. The hotel was nice and the best part was the Country Bear restaurant right in the parking lot. Made for an easy dinner and very well priced.

We're driving down in two cars and we left at different times but somehow, when we were about an hour out of Medford I looked over and saw the Kilden family coming onto the freeway from an off ramp. Almost 1,000 km and somehow we ended up at the same location at the same time and we noticed each other. Our day two destination was Stockton California. Like most places with a 'reputation' there are different views of what the city looks like. Our hotel was in an area with shopping and didn't look too bad but we did see some rougher areas on our way in. The hotel looked nice but for some reason the service was lacking. Our room only had two hand towels and no bath towels.

Day two consisted of about 6 hours of driving and day three was scheduled to be about the same but Los Angeles had something different to say about that. Travel was great for the first four hours but the last hour took closer to three. Just when we thought traffic was clearing up we'd end up stopped for construction or an accident. For the most part the other cars behaved but we had a few texting close calls. How people feel they can text and drive on a six lane highway is beyond me. We made it to the hotel around 2:30p which was too early to check in so we headed to the Garden Walk which is a strip mall near the park and had dinner at Bubba Gumps.

We checked into our hotel after dinner and the kids decided where everyone was going to sleep. We are staying in the Residence Inn near the park and our place has room to sleep 8 and a full kitchen. This will save us some money on food and the kids enjoy being with their cousins. (For now. We'll check in on day 5.) We've stayed here a few times before because the hotel also takes dogs. That adventure was a few years ago. We finished the day off with a quick trip to downtown Disney where Carter was ready to spend all his money at once. I managed to make him think about it for the night. We'll be back.