Harry Potter Land!

It is possible I was a little excited about Harry Potter land. If you want to go here, go on a weekday at 8 am. We did the whole thing including the rides twice each before breakfast. 

Apparently it is always winter here. This might be odd in the summer. When you first walk in there is the Hogwarts train. They have an inside the train where you can pay to have your picture taken as if you were on the train. We did not, maybe if we had costumes...

Us at the entrance to Harry Potter Land

Hogwarts Express

After the train are a bunch of shops. Some real, some fake. There is the joke shop (left), the candy shop (right), a wand shop, and a 2 big souvenir stores. After the stores you see the castle! So exciting. 

Castle!

The first ride we did was the Hippogriff roller coaster. The line was said 5 min. Most of that was actually walking there. The ride was fun, but very short. We went on it a second time and walked a lot slower through the line to actually look at all the neat things. 

Hagrid's Hosuse

The beginning of the roller coaster. 

Selfie at the end of the roller coaster.

The next ride was in the castle. I don't remember the name, but it's a 3D ride moving on an actual track. Like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride meets roller coaster meets 3D movie. I liked it. The path to the ride was long, the line was nearly empty, but so far. We went on this one twice too, the second time we let a bunch of people past us just so we could look at everything. The castle was very well done. I loved how they did the talking paintings. I tried to get a video, it isn't the best due to lack of patience. 

Sorting Hat

Mandrake Root

 At the end of the ride there was a shop. I finally found a snowglobe with a castle in it. It was absurdly overpriced so I didn't buy it. I took a video instead. 

After we had finished all the rides we started looking at the stores. I tried on official wizarding robes from Ravenclaw of course. We also looked at the wand shop. The wands are interactive in the park. So at certain places in the park they actually do things. Might have to try this out someday. You can get into the wand shop normally though the door, or you can do the "wand experience". When we got to this point the wait for this was 55 min, so we didn't wait. Later we came back and decided if it was less than 20 min we would wait. It was exactly that, but ended up being more like 10. I wouldn't consider it worth it. You go in a room with a crowd of people, and only one person gets to go through the picking experience. 

At this point I was regretting not eating breakfast. We got a Butterbeer to share while we made our way to the Three Broomsticks. I was expecting lunch, but they were still serving breakfast. Lucky! I didn't even know they had breakfast. I got the full English breakfast, which was surprisingly good for theme park food. 

After eating we decided to look at the rest of the park. There was a 60 min studio tour. I thought it would be nice to sit for an hour, so we did that. The 3D rides on the tour were not that good; mostly the car just jerked around a lot and hurt my back. The tour itself was interesting. We saw a bunch of sets where movies were made. 

Oh no! A Plane crash!

Universal Studios has a lot of shows. Which is nice because you can rest a little. We tried to see all of them. There was a special effects demonstration during which they lit a guy on fire. There was a Hollywood animals show that had trained chickens. I didn't pictures of those, but they were both enjoyable. I took one picture of the set of the Waterworld stunt show. The plot was ok, but the stunts were fun. We sat directly behind the wet zones seats hoping to not get too wet. It worked. The area to the left of the picture has no dry zones... The people in the show were very good at spraying water with their jet skis, mostly over there. Towards the end of the show a fake plane crashes in the water and soaks everyone over there. 

Next we headed to the lower part of the park to go on The Mummy roller coaster and the Jurassic Park water ride. The Mummy ride is great. The souvenir picture timing on it is perfect. They don't let you take pictures of your pictures, but my expression was of complete shock. We went on it again right away trying out the single rider line to avoid the 15 min wait. We ended up getting seated right next to each other anyway. 

After this we went over to the Jurassic Park ride. On the way there I was followed by an Anubis guy on stilts. Steven tried to video this rather than warn me that I was being followed... We did the single rider line again. This time I was right in front of Steven. This was also a good ride, the end is mildly terrifying. 

There are a few more rides mostly 3D movies in a moving seat, not worth mentioning. I doubt I would go on them again. 

Disneyland

Hiking in Yosemite was about 15,000 steps, Disneyland was over 20,000. That was without staying the entire day. The thing I was most looking forward to on this trip was riding the Matterhorn. I have no memory of riding this ride, only of it always being closed. I even check before getting tickets, and it was open. Apparently, I did not check enough, because it was closed. Doing some research while waiting for the park to open Steven discovered that it is only open on busy days. Since it seems silly to go to Disneyland on a busy day that makes sense why I never see it open. 

We made excellent use of the Fast track tickets, and never had a line much more than 20 min. Our goal when we first got there was to go to the new Tomorrowland rides. This was also everyone else's goal. The line to just get a fast track ticket for Hyperspace Mountain was huge! We bypassed that line and went to the regular line, which only took 17 min for the front row. Here is a picture of our picture from the ride. We managed to get this one in twice. 

Another Tomorrowland ride let's you take a trip underwater in a submarine! Getting in some underwater photography is important on every trip...

Castle Selfie

60th Anniversary blue Mickey ears!

One of my favorite rides is "It's a Small World". Unlike most people the song does not get stuck in my head, and the ride is so happy. This picture demonstrates very well our respective enthusiasm levels... If you want to enjoy the ride too, I made a video!

Another Fanstasyland favorite is the the teacups! I could ride this all day! (If it wasn't in the sun...)

Steven making use of our underwater camera on Splash Mountain. 

 It was a fun, but exhausting day. We probably should have taken more breaks. I think we made good use of our time, we managed to get every ride we wanted done, and a couple twice. :)

As we were leaving Disneyland a duck flew right near my head. Steven saw this happening and yelled, "Duck!" Then spent the next 20 minutes being ridiculously giddy that he finally had the chance to shout that and mean it both ways. 

Joshua Tree

Since we got a National Parks Pass in Yosemite we wanted to go to as many as we could this year. My friend was getting married in Los Angeles, so we added a few hours to the drive to go to Joshua Tree National Park. 

Since we finalized our plans very last minute we did not have a chance to reserve a campsite. Our plan was to get up really really early and get there as close to the check in time as we could. It worked out well enough. I wish they had a street view tour of the campsites so you could pick out which you wanted ahead of time. We stayed in Belle Campground. It was supposed to have very dark and clear skies. This was very true. 

The campsites are very tiny. Some would only fit one very small tent. We got a decent spot, with two of our own personal huge rocks to climb. We liked this spot because it had a wide open not camping spot behind the huge rock that made it look bigger. 

Street view of our campsite

Street view a little to the left to include the funky yucca.

Plant life near our site.

View from our tent.

We got settled around 4pm, and started to explore the rocks nearby.  A lot of the rocks near us were very easy to climb and not very high. The one across the street you could almost hike up. 

Steven climbing a big boulder.

A few campsites down we found this easy climb. If you go up the right side is very easy to climb, no rope needed. Going up the front would probably be easy, but if you fell it would not be safe. There was a really good looking rock to set up an anchor on for top roping. Steven climbed up there to check it out. It ended up not being a good rock, so we gave up and went to make dinner.

We had a very simple dinner consisting of leftover food we could cook on a fire, sausages and potatoes. Cooking sausages over a fire always makes them so tasty. After dinner we had to move our tent. The wind was crazy, so we tried to get it as close to the big rock as we could. It helped some, but not perfectly. Luckily since we packed light for camping we were able to just pick up our tent with everything in it and set it down in the new spot. The stuff even stayed were it was supposed to. 

We brought a nice camera in case we wanted to take star pictures once it got dark. We were too tired to bother. I did get this shot of a Joshua Tree with my phone. 

The next morning we got up very early, packed up our camp and headed out for hiking. Just up the road at another camp area, was short hike to see Arch Rock. Despite being a guided trail complete with informational signs the trail wasn't very obvious. The ground all looked like the same sandy texture, we didn't get lost, but it was a big difference from the very obvious forest paths that we are used to.

After that hike, we headed over to the ranger led hike to learn about rocks. It wasn't a long hike, but it felt like walking in sand. There were lots of desert plants in bloom, but it was too windy to take pictures of most of them.

We had planned to do more hiking after the Ranger walk, but it was cold and windy and we were tired. Swimming at our hotel seemed like a nice option. After a quick stop to get my National Park stamp, we headed to Anaheim. There ended up being a lot more traffic than we had planned for so we didn't have enough time to swim before our dinner plans. Afterwards I was too tired.

My new row marker/ pattern holder.

Benihana fried rice near Disneyland.

Book Review: Simply Calligraphy

I got this book about a week too late, as I ended up needing to write some numbers with a calligraphy pen this past week. I really like this book. It is well laid out and as the name suggests simple. It doesn't just give you pointers and then sample alphabets, it breaks things down into simpler steps. The letters are presented with the simplest ones first, rather than alphabetical. 

If you are looking for an in depth book about calligraphy, this is not what you are looking for. I think it is better suited for people who just want a basic understanding of how to write in calligraphy for special occasions it is an excellent choice. 

A random Tuesday post

The library near our home has been doing these monthly adult craft nights. They are free and only take an hour, so I have been trying to go each month. Some have been awful, some have been just ok. Today's actually went decently well. They had all the supplies needed and they had the correct supplies for the project. 

The project was watercolor mugs. It wasn't actually watercolor, it was some paint we combined with rubbing alcohol to have a watery effect. This time the only issue with the supplies was they used paper cups for the rubbing alcohol and it wasn't structurally sound for very long. Some people made some really creative mugs. Some people made mugs that looked like a toddler painted them. One woman actually wrote, "I hate you" on hers, not sure what was up with that...

Here are mugs Steven and I made. Can you guess whose is whose?

After the painting we went down to our gym. Steven has been trying to encourage me to get back into running. His latest attempt was offering to do it with me. This resulted in this very silly picture of him pouting on a treadmill. :)

Yosemite Day 3

Despite being exhausted from the Mirror Lake hike we headed out for a long hike. The plan was to head towards Vernal Falls and go until I was getting too tired and turn back. We cut our gear down to one bag and Steven kindly carried it, to make it a little easier on me. The problem with this plan was the hard part was exciting.

The first part of the hike is paved but very steep, this ends with a view of Vernal Falls on a bridge over the Merced River. After this the trail changes a little still mostly paved, but slightly less steep until you reach the stairs. There are over 600 of them and they go straight up the cliff. They are also very wet because the whole time the waterfall is spraying everything. 

About halfway up is a beautiful viewpoint. We even saw a rainbow, and of course took a waterfall selfie.

Once we made it to the stop we took a break, dried off, and had a snack. Then headed down to look over the falls. It was really crowded here, so we didn't stay up close for very long.

Our Lunch View.

After going up those stairs, I decided there was no way I was going down them. Given my terrible luck with stairs walking down crowded slippery stairs on the edge of a cliff seemed unwise. Luckily there was another way down. The signage for this was terrible, and the internet gave inaccurate distance measurements. Happily, it said it was longer than it actually was. 

We headed up the Merced River looking for the trail. At the trail intersection we were discussing which way to go, mostly because I was confused. A helpful hiker heading down said it was worth it to go see the bottom of Nevada Falls, he called the path "relatively flat". And, yes, compared to a staircase up the side of a cliff it was relatively flat, but it was not flat. The falls were beautiful though. Definitely worth the extra distance. The path continued up to the top of this falls but there was no way that was happening. We headed back to the trail merge and took the John Muir trail down.   

We headed back to the trail merge and took the John Muir trail down. Expect down actually meant up. So much up in fact that this picture of Vernal Falls isn't as far up as we went. There are actually people in this picture, but they are so tiny you can barely see them. The second picture is Nevada Falls after we walked far and up from it.

Nevada Fall 

Eventually the trail started going down, switch backing down the mountain. We were now on the cold side of the mountain and we saw patches of snow. Steven took a picture, but I was too tired. The trail was not very smooth and very steep, so it started hurting my already hurting knee. I was very happy to be done with this hike.

Steven found some mistletoe.

We named this "Face Rock"

After the hike we grabbed a quick bite of food, and headed home. I had wanted to hike to the base of El Capitan. It was on the way out and a short walk. Instead I changed out of my hiking clothes into my footise pajamas vowing to not get up until I was in our garage. I succeeded at this. And went to bed very early again. 

Step count highly lessened by my hiking poles 13, 403. The next day I was so tired from all of this I did less than 1000.