Elephants eat hay

Did you know that? We didn't. We thought hay was for horses. We saw lots of Elephants at the Wild Animal Park with Grandma Joan and LOTS of other people.


See, look at our big group.


It was lots of fun. We learned how to make slime. We mostly watched . . .


. . . but Grandma Meehan did get us to touch it one time.


There were also these awesome birds there. If you had food for them in your hand, they would land right on your arm and eat it. We were happy to just watch that too.

Long walk on a long pier

There's a pier right outside the place where we're staying. We thought it be fun to walk down it. We found the secret password and told it to the pelicans that were perched on the railing. They were HUGE.


Did we mention it was a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong pier?


When we finally reached the end of it, there was a restaurant that had milkshakes. Grandma Meehan let us have some of her double chocolate shake. Charley let her have the strawberry though.

Hot tubbin'

We finally got a chance to check out the pool. We spent most of our time in the hot tub. We met a new friend too. His name is Jim and he's a Michigander. He was a pretty funny Michigander.


Next to come down was Grandpa Meehan. He's not a Michigander.


Neither is Kinsey. She came down too and did some tricks for us in the big pool.


Then we showed her a few of our own tricks back in the hot tub.


And of course, we did some lounging as well.

The rides

Disneyland is quite possibly the most amazing place ever. We rode flying elephants there!


Second only to the flying elephants was Pooh's ride. We got to sit in giant honey combs and take a ride to Pooh's house.


It was pretty incredible too.


We rode the carousel right away and loved that.


And of course we went on It's a Small World, too. It was amazing as well.


We were mesmerized.


See.

New friends

We got to meet all kinds of awesome characters like Tigger . . .


. . . and of course Pooh, to whom we gave a great big hug.


Did we mention Tigger? When we first saw him, he came at us as Tiggers
usually do . . . REALLY FAST. We weren't exactly ready for him.


Oh yeah, and we can't forget Chip (or was it Dale?) who came over to make Jax feel better. He did, and was even able to steal a Cheerio from Jax in the process. He was a sneaky chipmunk.


Last but not least . . . TIGGER! The second time we saw him, we were
ready for him. We're not sure he was ready for us that time.

The rest of it

It was a pretty awesome day. Check out these Mickey Mouse shaped suckers.


We spent most of our time hanging out with our Cousin Kendall. She's super cool because she'll actually respond to us when we ask her a question and she'll make animal noises with us too.


We did have to share our time with Kendall and our family with about a million other people.


And we had to do a lot of standing in line.


We did what we could to entertain ourselves and those around us.


Once we got on the rides, they were really cool, but REALLY loud.


We were really tired by the time late afternoon rolled around.


And we mean REALLY tired.

Escaping. Searching. Chasing. Walking

The beach everything we remembered, but colder. Mommy was not very good at judging the waves.


The beaches here are covered with the coolest rocks. They're all rounded and really smooth.


Let us not forget the birds. They are as good for chasing here as they are back home.


We love the beach. Do we have to go back to all that snow?

CharleyJax requesting a fly-by

There really aren't many things better in this world than swings on a beach. We took full advantage of this and even got a little target practice in with Aunt Jen-Jen.


Believe it or not, Grandma Jean helped. She was great at pushing us REALLY high.


There was a also a full playground there. Perfect for climbing . . .


. . . and sliding.

Sand does not equal snow

Sure it's great for scooping and throwing. Justin and Jeremy, our second cousins where great at helping us with that . . .


. . . but you just can't make a decent angel in it.


AND you have to take a bath afterward instead of drinking hot cocoa. We keep asking ourselves which is better. At this point, we think it might be a toss-up.

Firetruck, at the BEACH!

As if all the excitement of beach wasn't enough, we saw a brand new
firetruck parked right by the beach where we were playing.


The super-cool firefighters even let us climb inside. Too bad Daddy didn't get a very good picture of us inside that big beautiful thing.

Re-acquainted

Once we got as good a night of sleep as we could, we headed to room down the hall for breakfast greetings. We re-met Grandma Joan who is JUST LIKE Grandma Jean in EVERY WAY, except for one letter in her name. Thank goodness Kinsey was there to help straighten everything out . . .


. . . and play Play-Doh with us.

The . . . waiting . . . place . . .

. . . For people . . . just . . . waiting. And we were definitely waiting. We knew we had a two-hour layover, but those two hours turn into three-and-a-half . . . and then . . . just more than four-hours as they kept delaying our flight. So we took the opportunity to ride the escalator, FOUR times.


Then we found the airport train and decided to ride it too. FOUR times!


We were at least a little productive as we waited for our flight to leave.


That only lasted so long. We decided exploring the middle of the rows of chairs was more fun.


By the time we actually got on our flight and landed out west, we were exhausted. It was midnight our time, a mere twelve hours after we left. We made it though.