5th Anniversary Trip to California!

For our fifth anniversary, I wanted to do something special.  I decided that a road trip to California would be super fun and also inexpensive.  Priuses are amazing for road trips, we barely spent over $100 on gas for the whole trip.  Add to that the employee discount we got at our Fairfield Inn, no eating out since we had free breakfasts and a microwave and mini fridge in our room, cheap tickets for Disneyland's Halloween Party, and only a small amount of souveniers, we made off very well on this vacation.  Plus I don't even feel like we had to compromise.  We had a fantastic time.

We left at around 4:30am on Friday the 17th.  I'm glad we did because we were able to make it to our hotel by 3:30pm and had plenty of time to settle in, go grocery shopping, and spend some time at the pool.

On Saturday we started the day with a hike.  We found the Dripping Cave trail, a nice hike that was a good enough workout without being enough to make us hate the next few days.  Later in the day we went to Salt Creek Beach to watch the sunset.  It was so nice to be at the ocean again.

We had our first snorkeling trip on Sunday.  We went to Crescent Bay Beach.  I have to say that I don't like snorkeling in California nearly as much as I like snorkeling in Hawaii.  Maybe we just hit it at a bad time, but the water was less calm, and there wasn't very much wildlife.  We also stopped by the Pacific Marine Mammal Center, which is a place where they rehabilitate injured seals and then release them back into the wild.  They were so cute and fun to watch.

This little orange guy is California's state fish

On Monday we visited Huntington Beach and took a walk on the pier.  It was a very fun little surfer spot.  After that we stopped by the big mall called Fashion Island in Newport Beach.  There is a Tesla showroom there that Blake was excited to see.  It was a huge mall with lots of fancy stores.  We had fun wandering around window shopping.

Tuesday was an interesting day.  We drove to the San Diego area to do some things down that way.  It started out great with a visit to see the 'Disney princess castle' aka the San Diego LDS temple.  It is such a pretty temple.  After that things didn't go so well.  I have always wanted to swim with sharks of the less harmful variety, and I was excited to find a beach in California where you can often do that.  It's called La Jolla Shores and it is supposedly filled with leopard sharks, which are basically harmless bottomfeeders, but sharks nonetheless.  Unfortunately, there were apparently storm surges in California this week due to that hurricane near Hawaii, and the waves here were pretty big.  We knew we could handle them but were feeling a bit hesitant.  We finally worked up the courage to move out into the water.  When we got to the point where the waves were breaking the worst, I got hit by a big wave that pulled my snorkel and mask off to the side and got me a good breath of water.  I already hate waves and so that made me feel upset and slightly panicky.  I got out past the break and calmed myself down mostly, but of course there were still waves coming.  We snorkeled for a while, but the waves were making visibility very bad.  We saw a stingray and a bunch of teeny fish, but no sharks.  After a while I was feeling too uncomfortable with the waves and low visibility and decided to call it quits.  Luckily we made it in to shore much easier than our way out.  So after that disappointing snorkel, we drove to what was supposed to be one of the best tide pools and got there right before low tide.  Unfortunately, the storm surge struck again and we were hardly able to see anything at all.  So we went home defeated and looked forward to the next day, which was definitely going to be much better.

Pretty sure that's an alien

Wednesday was Disney day!  We decided to buy tickets to Mickey's Halloween Party instead of one day passes because they were much cheaper and we still got to be there for 8 hours.  We went early and spent some time at Downtown Disney before we were allowed to enter Disneyland.  The lines were not bad at all and we got to do everything we wanted to do.  I was so happy to be there!  Disneyland is probably my favorite place in the world.

As is tradition, our first ride of the day was Indiana Jones

Dole Whips are the best treat at Disney!

I love Haunted Mansion Holiday even more than the original!

Sally left before we got through the line :(

 

According to California, going to Disneyland will give you cancer.  And so will.... pretty much everything ever.

Blake was excited to get the wait time approximator badge

The Halloween fireworks show!

The shuttle bus back to the car at the end of the day. 

Thursday was our last day.  We were very tired and had sore feet from our day at Disney, so we spent a few hours relaxing and swimming at the pool.  In the evening we went back to Crescent Bay Beach to take some anniversary pictures and watch the sunset.  I think they turned out pretty good for self-timer photos. :)