Day 1- Thurday (headed to Disneyland!)

So today was our travel day but we weren’t leaving until 3:00 so we had the whole day to do normal activities. I went to work, Matt stayed home with the kids (they had a half day which equals about 2.5 hours of school) and Clara took the day finishing up her projects for school. For those reading who didn’t know, Clara is my youngest sister (she’s 14) that we are taking on this weekend trip. She has never been to Disneyland- in fact she has never even been on an airplane before! The kids are very excited to show her around :)


So 3:00 rolls around and our ride shows up- a limo! The kids were really excited. Little do they know that we actually paid less for this then a regular town car lol. Normally to the airport we take shuttle express but the pickup time for our flight was when I was still scheduled to work so we couldn’t. Paying for parking at the airport would’ve been less too but that is time that we just didn’t have either!

So we make it to the airport around 4:00 (boarding for our flight started at 5:18) and we trek down to security. We had paid for express security which saved us a ton of time even though the airport wasn’t too busy since it was a Thur evening. We all got dinner while we waited for our flight then boarded without issue, on time.

We landed around 8:00 and got right into a taxi (we didn’t check our luggage) and headed to Disneyland hotel. Normally we chose to stay at the Grand Californian hotel and spa but they can’t guarantee a bed set up for 5 so we needed to venture somewhere else. The kids were excited to stay there and we were very open minded to trying a different hotel, especially since the hotel as undergone a huge refurbishment the last cpl years. In the end it served our purpose but if it were just the 4 of us we wouldn’t go back (more on that later).

We got to the hotel around 8:30, checked in and the kids were totally wired. It’s too bad the parks closed at 8 today because all they wanted to do was go on rides! We got them into bed around 9:30 after a quick snack run and walk outside. Everyone was off to sleep!