La Terre de Disney

Have you heard the theory some people have that World War I and World War II are really just one enormous war, with a brief peaceful interlude that led to the second part?

Well, I just had Summer Vacation II, but it was really part of one great summer vacation with a week of working thrown in the middle.

On Tuesday I rode with my family back to California to take my nephews back and to go to Disneyland. None of us kids in my family got to go to Disneyland as kids. I got to go two years ago, and my sister went on that trip, as well as a trip when I was on my mission. But my brother hadn't been at all until this trip.

Tuesday we drove the whole day with four kids in the car. Preston was intentionally annoying, asking "Are we there yet?" frequently. He also likes to ask millions of questions. Susanne was being silly with him and wrote love notes to princesses, pretending that he wrote them. She did that to Franklin too, but Franklin is hypersensitive and started crying. Franklin also took up telling bizarre jokes, which I plan on writing about on my other blog. Baby is the happiest, youngest, and best behaved of my nephews, and he was perfect on the car ride.

On Wednesday we went to see the La Brea tar pits. I didn't take any pictures because I don't like my camera and because I'd been there before. This is a place where Miocene-age liquid asphalt seeps up through the ground. They have some of the seeps contained, but some of it is just randomly popping up through the grass. It has been doing this for thousands of years. During the Ice Age, animals would get caught in the "tar," which isn't very deep, but is deep enough for the animals to get stuck. They would die and then get buried, and the process would continue. There are thousands of Ice-Age fossils there, including giant ground sloths, mammoths, dire wolves, short-faced bears, and saber-tooth cats. It's amazing that ten thousand years ago, which isn't really that long ago, there were camels, elephants, and horses roaming around North America! Fossils really are amazing, but I do wish they had spent more time explaining the geology there. They only focus on the fossils, but I wanted to know more about the liquid asphalt and why it's seeping up. I got into geology because of the fossils, but I've learned that there's a lot more interesting things than just fossils.

We were going to go to Grauman's Chinese Theater, but it was really busy. Apparently there were riots there that day. It was a good day not to go.

Thursday was our day at Disneyland. We went to both Disneyland and California Adventure. My brother's family has a friend who works for Pixar, so they were able to get free tickets. There were only three kids who needed to buy tickets. It is really expensive. But Lagoon is very expensive, and Lagoon doesn't even hold a candle to Disneyland. Disneyland is meticulously detailed and very clean. I can't say the same for Lagoon.

Most of the rides we went on were the more kid-friendly ones. Which is fine, but it means I didn't get to go on the more exciting rides. The only really exciting one was California Screamin'. (As a side note only tangentially related, I think this trip has made the Mamas and the Papas a new favorite of mine.) Franklin wanted to go to the haunted house. When we called it the Haunted Mansion, I think he thought we were saying "Haunted Mountain." Once we were inside, he didn't like it and said to me, "I didn't know it was going to be that tary [scary]." But when we got done, Baby said he wanted to do it again.

The boys all wanted the same identical water bottle fan as the souvenir my mom got them. Since I act like a child, my mom got me a souvenir as well, a Nightmare Before Christmas t-shirt. I like it because most Nightmare shirts are marketed to the goth/emo demographic, but this shirt is a reminder that The Nightmare Before Christmas is not a marketing gimmick but is actually a movie, a very clever movie. (The worst example of Jack Skellington marketing I've seen was a shirt that had four ordinary skeletons (no clothes, normal anatomy) playing musical instruments, and each skeleton had Jack's head. It didn't even make sense!)

Then Friday we said goodbye to Preston, Franklin, and Nathaniel and drove back to Utah.

Then yesterday my parents bought me things in preparation for my field studies class next month.

And hopefully my air conditioning will be fixed tomorrow, right in time for the hottest time of the year.