Final preparations are underway for our first vacation of the year. We’ll be heading up to the Bay Area this week, hitting Hearst Castle, Monterey & Carmel, San Jose and San Francisco and visiting my brother brionv and his fiancee, my aunt, and sekl and non_seqvitvr. We’ll also be attending WonderCon for the second time. We had fun last year, but figured on making it an occasional trip rather than something annual. Then we decided to go visit people in the area, and found out the best week (i.e. when was going to be done with her current job) was going to be the week leading up to the convention. If we were going to be in San Francisco anyway, the con was cheap, so we might as well go. (Then the perfect timing became irrelevant, but we had already bought tickets to the con, and I’d already arranged for the time off, so we were at least partly anchored to this weekend in San Francisco.)
It looks like this trip is certainly going to mirror last year’s trip in one more aspect: rain. Someday we’ll have to schedule a trip up north at a time that it’s expected to be sunny. (I’m guessing February isn’t it.)
Thursday: Disneyland — for the first time in maybe 5 years. There are definite advantages to visiting in the off-season, during a weekday… like the 5-minute wait for Pirates of the Caribbean. Thankfully, the changes to align it with the movies were minimally invasive, and the last view of Jack Sparrow demonstrates some seriously impressive motion capture. Some other nice updates to Haunted Mansion and Jungle Cruise. The new “wildest ride in the wilderness!” recording at Big Thunder Mountain, however, is a travesty. Splash Mountain and the train were closed. They seem to be piratifying Tom Sawyer’s island. Pirates, Indy and Big Thunder kept breaking down, but we still managed to hit all three (some of them twice). It was odd to see fruit carts all over the place. It’s actually possible to eat mostly healthy food at Disneyland now. Finished off the day with dinner at the Blue Bayou.