Spring Break: Day Three

We spent Wednesday  morning at the San Diego Zoo. The zoo is big--not quite as big as the one in DC (I think), but bigger than our usual zoo. Probably the best thing we did was ride the guided bus tour around the zoo--it cut out a lot of walking (in the middle of a week of a lot of walking).

Actually, that might be a lie. We enjoyed the bus tour--but our favorite thing was probably the sky tram, which takes you across the top of the park. (You can see Andrew on the tram below). Evelyn's favorite part of the park was the elephants. I'm not sure what Andrew liked best, but he made us take a long detour just so we could see raptors (birds of prey).

We made our escape around 1 p.m. and drove north to Anaheim. We splurged a little for our last three nights in CA and got a hotel suite with two rooms. The kids room was *huge*--it had a bunk bed and a pullout bed. But it was so nice to put the kids to bed in a separate room and not have to worry about waking them up if we wanted to watch TV. And yes, I have a picture of the room.

The kids wanted to go swimming as soon as we got to the hotel. I'd arranged for a four-day pass to Disneyland so that we could go into the park that afternoon, so I wanted to go to the park, but I was eventually out-voted. And I'm glad I was. It was nice to take a break and the kids loved splashing around for a little while.

And we did eventually  make it to the park. We went on a few rides--Evelyn had her first taste of Thunder Mountain Railroad and decided it was a little too scary for her taste.

This is not a very good picture of Dan or of the kids, but it makes me laugh. (You'll notice that *I* don't show up in any of these pictures. That's what happens when you're the blog editor).

We also had one of those serendipitous meetings that I'm deciding are my favorite part of the park experience: we ran into Sleeping Beauty just outside her castle and got her autograph.

This was only the first of many. I remembered from last time that we'd had fun running into characters around the park and taking pictures--I thought it would be fun to get autographs too, so I ordered autograph books for the kids before we left. I'm still glad I did that, although it had sort of unintended consequences. Andrew--with all of his intensity and competitiveness--seized onto the autograph books with gusto. He didn't particularly care if *he* was the one to meet the character (we got several signatures while he was on exciting rides with his dad and Evelyn and I got to wait in lines), but he did care about numbers. We came away with signatures of 24 different characters, but I think Andrew was disappointed that rain on our last day meant that he didn't get even more signatures. (Evelyn's book only had one blank page left in it--I'm not sure what we would have done had Andrew succeeded in his quest).