Birthday Time!

For Jeremiah's 29th birthday this year, can you guess where we went? Yup, good ol' Disneyland! Here are some of the highlights from our most recent adventure there.

We were very excited as we got to the Main Gate before the entire park opened and they let us gather around on Main Street until they lowered the rope and let everyone loose in the park.

As customary for us, we headed off to Space Mountain as the line for that ride gets really long later in the day. It was practically a walk-on for us and it was so much fun.

Then we headed over to Space Blasters (our new favorite ride – as you may know, we are both really competitive and this game allows you to compete against each other to see who can get the most points)

Note: This was the best picture of us on this ride but it was the one time we road it without competing because we were trying to find some of the ride's secrets :)

After some more rides and around lunch time, we went to the Blue Bayou, our favorite restaurant and the only place we think is worth the price if you are going to eat in the park. In case you aren't familiar with it, it's a restaurant inside the ride The Pirates of the Caribbean. So as you are eating, you can watch the boats in the ride float by. It's a very fun and romantic atmosphere.

After lunch, we officially discovered that we are getting old. We took the ferry over to Tom Sawyer's Island, found a comfortable bench near a tree house, sat down, and fell asleep for at least an hour. Then we moseyed around the island for at least another hour just enjoying the relaxed environment we were in.

After the island and some other rides, we went to Splash Mountain. It was a little after 6pm and boy were we lucky that it was a warm day out because we got drenched! On Tom Sawyer's Island, you can get a pretty good view of the logs coming down and see just how wet everyone gets from the ride. On a previous visit to Disneyland while we were watching the logs coming down, we were trying to figure out if there was any cycle to how wet people got on the ride.

In the middle of pondering this, an Island security guard started talking to us. He had been working for Disney for a while and told us that there isn't any cycle to the water and there is no way to determine how wet each log and its riders will get. And they do not turn down the water levels in the winter or turn them up in the summer. They are consistent all year long. So if you think about riding this in the winter months, make sure to be prepared to get soaked cause there is no way to tell how wet you will be after coming off this ride.

The only thing that really determines how wet you can get is the distance of the logs between each other in the rides. If your log goes down that drop soon after the log in front of you, there is a good chance you will get drenched since your log will be hitting the displaced water from the previous log. If there is plenty of distance between when the log in front of you goes down and when your log goes down, then you probably won't get too wet.

Well, since finding out this information, we have made it a routine to always sit in the back of the log where you get the least wet, even if your log is one of those "lucky" ones. Earlier on in the ride, the riders in front of us got pretty wet from the smaller drops and my foot had a big splash of water hit it as well. We all should have known that these were signs of danger to come. We started up the track for the big drop and I noticed that we weren't too far behind the log in front of us. I knew this wasn't going to be pretty.

We reached the top and started down. We smiled for the picture and then I ducked with my hands over my face as we neared the bottom of the drop. The next thing I know, I'm dripping wet and everyone is screaming. We got completely soaked. Jeremiah kept his eyes open for the drop to witness the whole thing and he said that the water came completely over the boat, above the height of our heads! Fortunately, we didn't get it as bad as the four passengers in front of us but almost all of our clothes had water marks on them. So, even though it was getting into the evening, we were very fortunate that it was a warm day and the warm air was still in the air. We dried off relatively quickly and now have great memories of that infamous drop.


More rides ensued and we finished off the evening with a train ride a few times around the park and the Disneyland Fireworks while on Thunder Mountain Railroad.



All in all, this was a wonderful day and another great birthday adventure at Disneyland!

Happy Birthday Sweetie!