San Diego: Chapter 34 of the Memoir

This year our family vacation was to San Diego.  We love an all inclusive and a beach, but I thought we would change it up a bit this year and go to California as Lucas really wanted to see a Cheetah.  When he has a bad dream we often discuss all the places in the world we would like to go.  Top of his list is Paris, but after that is to go to the San Diego Zoo.  So that was our vacation this year.

The zoo was amazing.  It was a reasonable price, we got to see panda and orangutans and maned wolves.  They have a lot of volunteers and they were so helpful.  They are concerned about the environment and the whole time you are there you feel good about conservation and helping the earth.

 

We also went to the Safari Park which is kind of like San Diego Zoo, part two.  There we got to see the coolest part of our vacation which was the Cheetah run.  Late in the afternoon, they had a cheetah run the 100m dash.  It was incredible to watch and to hear.  The other part was we saw the cheetah run 3x times.  The other really interesting part of it was Amara the cheetah has a best friend, the dog.  I thought it would be dangerous for dog, but the cheetah and the dog are really best of friends.  At the end of the race they would walk around the race track together.  It was so sweet to see.


 

We also had times at the pool and one day we went to the ocean to see the sea lions.  Nathan's swimming was really good and he became a cannonball king.  We ate out at lots of restaurants, one Lucas learned about Mad Libs.  In his story he had a giant ketchup bottle chasing Mr. Potato head.   We laughed about it for days. 

One one of our last days (or so I thought) we went to Legoland.  Since I'm a planner I found out which rides were the most popular and we started with a roller coaster.  Nathan was running into the lines, where Lucas was having nothing of this new, scary thing.  So instead we started Lucas with some smaller rides.   The kids had fun but Darryl and I thought it was probably a once in a lifetime thing.  For the cost it wasn't great.  The younger kids enjoyed it, but the rides were very kidish.  I don't think they will enjoy it in a couple of years.






On our last day we drove up the Pacific Coast highway.  We drove through Laguna Beach and saw 3 Ferrari's just driving around.  It was a very rich place, but with very beautiful views.  We spent most of our day at Newport beach, where we had Rubys' delicious chocolate cherry shake.  We also went to a museum where Lucas taught me about bio luminescence.  Smart Cookie, that kid. 



That night we headed up to our hotel where they suggested we go to downtown Disney.  We went to the Rainforest Cafe, which has incredible ambiance but not as incredible food.  Then we saw beautiful fireworks. 



The next morning we packed up and headed to the airport.  We had trouble checking in at the airport, but chalked it up to flying a code share.  When we got to the airport the United attendant couldn't check us in either.  He could find our names but couldn't check us in.  He called the help desk and they realized I booked the flight for March 18th not February 18th.  Because February is exactly 4 weeks all the days are the same in March as they are in Feb.   As it was a long weekend there were no room on the flights we were going to take so we needed to call Air Canada to rebook.  We got out of line and got on the phone to call Air Canada.  To get all 4 of us home was going to take till Wednesday and was going to cost 900$.  Even the Air Canada agent recommended we look on expedia or something similar to get flights.  So instead I called the best airline I know of... WestJet.  They're soonest flight they could get all four of us out was Wednesday, for 300$ a person.... whew.  Instead we stayed in Anahiem and went to Disneyland!

Disneyland was fantastic.  The rides are great and entertaining to everyone, the attention to detail is spectacular.   Carsland was great the Radiator Springs Racers was as good as they say.  The Aladdin show was spectacular and we all really enjoyed the animation academy where we learned to draw Goofy, Pluto and Donald. 

Even though it cost us a fair bit more then we were expecting it was a great trip.  I love making memories and having fun stories to tell and this trip had lots of that. 

Jenn