Trip to California!

**This is just a general overview of our trip. I will write more details (with lots of pictures) on the various activities in subsequent posts.

After my husband and I went to Disney World last year we decided to make a goal to take the kids to Disneyland in the next year if possible. Since our kids are in year round school we have several opportunities to go during the year and not miss school instead of having to limit ourselves to a summer trip. We decided to go during their February break since it would be less crowded at that time and the tickets are cheaper as well. My husband is not the type that likes to do the planning for our trips so not long after Christmas I began looking for hotel rooms and started to plan the specifics of our trip. We knew that it wasn't going to be a cheap trip with 5 kids, but we wanted the kids to have the experience and this was really our first trip as a family that didn't involve going to visit extended family. There are a lot of families in our ward that go to Disneyland fairly regularly so we had lots of advice on places to stay and things to do while there. We decided to go drive down there on a Saturday and then return the following Saturday. Since this was our first trip to Southern California we decided to spend 3 days at Disneyland and then go to San Diego for a couple of days.

We left on Saturday, February 7th at about 7 in the morning and it took us about 11 hours to get there with stops for lunch and bathroom breaks. The kids did pretty good in the car and the only bad weather we had was some rain in Nevada and California. (The only problem we had on the drive down was that Baby K had a bad cold with a cough and runny nose.) Since we were staying 5 nights in Anaheim we got a really good deal on a hotel that was within walking distance of Disneyland. The hotel was an older one but it was clean and met our needs - just a place to crash at night, a working shower/bathroom and a small fridge and microwave. The hotel room had 2 bedrooms - one with 1 queen size bed in it and the second one had 2 queen size beds. So all of the kids with the exception of Baby K had beds to sleep on. For Baby K I just set up a makeshift bed on the floor next to my bed with a lot of blankets and padding.

On Sunday we drove across town to attend church with DH's aunt and uncle that live in the area. They were very gracious hosts and fed us a great dinner afterwards. We had a great time visiting with them and their kids that live in the area. They have a very kid friendly house and our kids kept commenting on how nice their dad's Aunt Cyndi and Uncle Matt were.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday we spent the whole day at Disneyland!!

Thursday morning we checked out of our hotel in Anaheim and drove down to San Diego to spend the next two nights. When we got there we spent some time at the beach and then checked into our hotel and just hung out/relaxed there for the rest of the day.

On Friday we spent the day at SeaWorld San Diego and then we left Saturday morning for home. We were a little concerned that we were going to run into bad weather in Utah because the forecast was calling for a good-size snow storm on Saturday morning, but by the time we drove through most of the snow was gone - thankfully! Baby K had a really hard time in the car on the drive home because she didn't want to be strapped in her car seat anymore - poor thing!