In previous posts I’ve talked about our long first days. This one did not let us down. Our day started at 5:20am CST. We got up and got everything packed in the car. Lisa’s mom was nice enough to give us a ride to the airport so we didn’t have to pay for parking. We were talking to Ellie about what she was going to do and what/who she was going to see on our trip. She said she was going to see princesses and told Grandma, “I’ll say Hi to the princesses for you”. It was really cute. We got to the airport and checked our bags at the skycap. We then ventured our way to the TSA Precheck line. This is the greatest thing ever. KCI has separated it from the standard security area and it is even easier and faster now. We got coffees at Starbucks and Ellie got an orange juice. I’ve never seen this girl drink orange in her life and she drank a whole bottle of Naked OJ. We got on the planes with mostly no problem. I had the stroller and car seat to check at the gate and didn’t realize we had to get them tagged before they were checked. Before we took off, we were getting settled and noticed Ellie put her backpack under the seat and told her good job. She said,'that girl told me to put my bad down there', referring to the flight attendant on the intercom reciting the rules of the plane. It was really cute.
The flight was fine. Nothing significant. It was almost 4 hours and that was a long time to keep Ellie occupied. She really did pretty good. She got tired at one point and tried to lay down. That didn’t work very well. She is a little to big to stretch out between us. We tried everything to keep her occupied and she really did pretty good (and I’m typing this the day of, so it couldn’t be too bad). There were some frustrations, but we all powered through.
We made it to LAX, which was different from our last trip flying through John Wayne. This was new for us. We had both been to LAX, but it had been a long time. It was ok. Nothing great. We didn’t have any problems, it just wasn’t very exciting. After we found the luggage, we found out that we had to take a shuttle to the rental car office. This was probably comical. Ok, so it is me, Lisa and Ellie. We have two big suitcases, a medium suitcase, each of us have a backpack, Lisa is pushing Ellie in the stroller and I had the car seat (which was in a huge backpack) strapped to my back. We really couldn’t have handled much more luggage. Getting across the street to the median where we got on the shuttle, we had to look ridiculous.
We got to the Alamo office and checked in. No problems there. We made our way over to the mid-sized vehicles area and they were all gone. So I asked someone which car we should take and she said which ever one we wanted. We picked a Nissan Altima, which is a full-size. This was a newer model of Lisa’s car. It was fun to drive and fun to compare with her car. It had enough room for all of our stuff and us, which was a miracle.
We made it. We are in California, with all of our stuff and ready to see the sites. The only thing on the agenda was to go to Griffith Park and the LA Zoo. I had planned a driving route to take a more touristy journey than the boring highway path. There was one problem, I didn’t know where I was starting. I knew I had to find the 405 and take it north. Well, I went the wrong way and wasted some time. We got back on track and found I-405, which happened to be where Randy’s Donut shop was. I remembered that it was in Iron Man 2. Pretty crazy and cool to see. We went north and the first thing we saw, other than typical weekend LA traffic, was smoke. The wildfires had died down some, but what we saw looked like smoke coming from a volcano. It was crazy. We drove north and got off on Wilshire. This was pretty cool because we drove through Westwood and then through Beverly Hills. Oh, and Ellie fell asleep 10 minutes into the drive. We continued all the way passed Rodeo drive and then took a detour. My goal was to go to Sunset and then Hollywood. Somehow, we missed a turn, but found Fairfax and got back on track. On the plus side, we saw The Grove and that was not planned. We made it back to Hollywood Blvd and took it to try and see the Chinese Theater. I said “try” because the road was closed and we couldn’t drive by it. Oh well. We then made our way up to Universal Studios, but couldn’t see it from where we were either. We did see Warner Bros studios and then we were able to find Providence Hospital and the Disney Studios. This was really cool. We were even able to see the Seven Dwarfs building from the road because the leaves were off the trees. We then needed to get back to Griffith Park. We found Forrest Lawn drive again and drove by the cemetery and on to the LA Zoo.
We enjoy going to zoos, as does Ellie. I thought this would be a good event for the day and it worked out. We got there sometime between 12:30pm and 1:00pm and they closed at 5:00. This was plenty of time. We really enjoyed this zoo. After going to San Diego on our last trip, this zoo is much more compact and the enclosures are easier to view the animals. The highlights of the zoo were: Ellie and Lisa feeding giraffes, seeing a Markor pick a fight with a tree that was wrapped in chain link fencing, the koala was active climbing through eucalyptus branches, a Komodo dragon that was HUGE, and Ellie loved seeing the flamingos and zebra. It was a fun zoo to see and I would do it again.
Next we needed to go check into the hotel and drop off the rental car. It took around an hour to get to the hotel from Griffith Park. It wasn’t a bad drive, some traffic, but not too bad. There was a really pretty sunset too. The hotel was pretty easy to get to and we got checked in. They had a bell service that helped us up to our room. So far, we love this hotel. It has a water park that Ellie really wants to go to. The lobby and buildings are very nice and the room is awesome. We have a separate room for Ellie that has a bunk bed and our room has a king bed. On top of that, our room looks out at Disneyland and is about a 6-8 minute walk to the parks. It is awesome. And the room is enormous. There is plenty of room for us and our stuff.
Our day was getting close to the end, but we needed to eat dinner and return the rental car. We wanted to go to Downtown Disney so Ellie and Lisa loaded up the stroller and they were going to meet me over there after I dropped off the rental car, which was also at Downtown Disney. Let's cover something really quick, Disney needs to redesign their setup of the Alamo rental car at Downtown Disney. The address on Google maps showed it was by the Grand Californian. I drove by a couple times because I couldn't find it. I decided to go into the Grand Californian and ask. They said the drop off is at a parking lot in the self parking of the Grand's parking lot across the street. I drove over their and asked the attendant. He instructed me where to park and said the key drop off was in the office in Downtown Disney. I found it on the side of the AMC Theaters. That was confusing.
Lisa decided to get pizza at Napolini. We waited a little while and went to the candy shop and new princess shop to wait. We waited about 30 minutes. It wasn't too bad of a wait. The restaurant was cool and really good food. A girl stopped by that made balloon animals. Ellie really liked it and it was a cute touch. She made her a unicorn. We had some type of mushroom pizza, which was yummy and Ellie destroyed her pasta. It was a good start to our trip.
After dinner, we walked back to our hotel and crashed. Even Ellie went to bed pretty easily.
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