Although we’ve been home for nearly 24 hours, I have to finish the last blog from our trip or I will go crazy. Even though our day was pretty uneventful, I feel like I need to bring closure to our vacation. Balancing the checkbook and doing all the laundry from the trip just sounds so unappealing right now, I’d much rather relive our last moments in paradise.
We slept in on our last day – which is huge for us. Usually, when we travel, we do not rest. I believe that if we don’t take in every single sight, sound and smell, we’ll be missing out on something remarkable that we’ll never get to experience again. And I always worry that it will be our last vacation and that I will get in a horrific accident and be a paraplegic for the rest of my life, so I feel I need to take advantage of the ability to be a tourist while I can still move my arms and legs without blowing into a tube connected to my electric wheelchair. But I guess being in a wheel chair wouldn’t be THAT bad because then I wouldn’t have to wait in any lines for rides at Disneyland. So, my point is this: We got lots of rest on this trip and that’s pretty cool.
After getting ready, we took the kids downstairs to Storyteller’s Café for a character breakfast. It’s a huge restaurant with an enormous buffet and it’s some of the best service we’ve ever had. The super friendly wait staff was on top of everything, the food was great and the characters paid so much attention to the guests, it was entirely worth the $130 it cost us. Ahem. Sort of.
After breakfast, we checked out of the hotel and left our bags with Bell Service because we had a few hours to shop before our shuttle came. I could go into detail about all the stores we visited, but that would be extremely boring. Instead I’ll tell you about the 10 cops we saw walking down to the entrance of Downtown Disney. Chad and Jackson walked down to investigate and the police officers and security guards had formed this sort of human barrier blocking off a large section of Downtown Disney. No one knew what was going on, but Chad heard someone say they had a bomb robot on the scene. We found out later that someone found a suspicious object. It turned out to be a geocache - which is a little GPS receiver used for a treasure hunt type thing. Kind of like high tech Letterboxing, which is what we do (did you just roll your eyes and call us nerds?) When we were in Disneyland in April, they shut down the entrance while we were waiting for our shuttle because there was a bomb scare (see last year’s blog) so I’m thinking this is a common occurrence down there.
Our Super Shuttle picked us up at 1:00 and we were at LAX and through security by 2:00, boarding passes in hand ready to get on the plane. But let me back track for a minute…
I am going to paint a word-picture for you of our shuttle driver. Did you see the movie The Soloist? Where Jamie Foxx plays Nathanial Ayers, that homeless weirdo musical genius? Okay, so imagine that character has a stroke... And then wears an ill-fitting eye patch and becomes a shuttle driver that likes to speed and then slam on the brakes sporadically. Are you picturing it? Then my word-picture is complete. On the ride to LAX, I was convinced that we were about to be in the horrible accident that I always assume is going to happen. Chad and I talked about how much trust we put in people around us. We trusted this guy to get us to the airport safely, even though everything in my body preferred to just carry our luggage and walk the 35 miles. We trusted the pilots who flew us through space, 40,000 feet in the air to get us to our destination safely. We trusted the 18 year old kids who put us on the Tower of Terror and we trusted the engineers who built that ride, that we wouldn’t plummet to our death (or at least crash to the ground thereby causing me to be a paraplegic.) We trust the cooks in restaurants that they don’t have any alarming diseases and that they properly wash their hands when they make our food. We trust the guys in line next to us at the store that he’s not going to pull out a gun and start shooting everyone.
I'm getting a little carried away. If I think about this too much, I’m pretty sure I’ll become agoraphobic. So onto more fun things…
A girl puked in a garbage can about 4 feet away from us at the airport and my biggest fear in the world is people barfing near me. Wait, no… that’s not fun…
We watched Raiders of the Lost Ark on the plane on the way home. That was fun. Oh, and we saw one of the most gorgeous sunsets of our lives from the window of the plane. Good times… We ate a pretty good turkey sandwich on the flight…
Can you tell that I’m running out of exciting things to talk about? Once again – and I’m sure I say this after every vacation – it was one of the best times this family has ever had together. Now we’re all sitting here together, cozy at home, while it snows outside and we don’t want to be anywhere else. Until we get that itch again…
To all who come to this happy place - Welcome,
The Niemeyers
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