On Saturday, Andy and I head off to Florida, to meet up with my parents to celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary with a week of corn dogs, Mickey ears, screaming children in strollers, and roller coasters.
We have been planning this trip for over a year and we are soooo excited! We promise to post many jealousy-inducing pictures of us having too much fun.
For now, here are pictures from our pre-blog, pre-engagement trip to Disneyland in 2005.
Our little castle was, in fact, the Hotel del Coronado, known as The Del. We enjoyed Coronado Island and the little village (yummy Mexican food!). I was pumped to stay at a fancy resort, and one where several movies had been filmed and many famous people had stayed. It is most famous for being the film location for Marilyn Monroe’s Some Like it Hot. I made sure to have Andy watch it before we left, so he kept dropping funny quotes the whole time. L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz books, often stayed here and used to hold story hour for the kids!
We stayed in a newer part of the hotel and had a great view of the famous original building and the pool. The resort has several great restaurants and cafes, and many shops to poke around in, including a great old fashioned ice cream shop. While we certainly enjoyed our room, the shops, the restaurants, and the pool, we were eager to head out to the beach!
We had a lovely couple of days relaxing. The pictures don’t really need captions, they’re just jealousy-inducing shots of us having fun. 
Right before my surgery, Andy had a work conference down in San Diego over the MLK Jr Day weekend. I was able to take a day off of work and enjoy a long weekend with him in the sun. It was so nice to relax before preparing for my hospital stay, and lovely to get some Vitamin D in January! Here are some picture highlights:
Andy and I have been to San Diego before (to go to the zoo, also in January, because of that whole “no sun in Seattle” thing), and knew that we wanted to stay in the historic Gaslamp Quarter.
We enjoyed the shops and restaurants around there, and then soaked up the sun walking to Seaport Village, where there are, surprisingly, more shops and restaurants! We enjoyed an outdoor plaza with live Spanish music, and I enjoyed a margarita early in the day!
Did I mention it was early?
We enjoyed a cultural festival near our hotel, took a break from the hot sun (vacations ARE for napping!), and then drove to La Jolla to enjoy the beach and sunset. We loved the area around La Jolla, so we hope to go back sometime!
I love this picture of Andy, as the wave hit him right when I snapped the picture. We agreed that this looks like the front of an album where Andy covers “light jazz hits”.
His face is worth a close up:
We had dinner at a tacky restaurant with bad food that was desperately trying to pretend to be all cool and fancy. We have yet to find good food around San Diego, but the cheesiness of the tiki bar was worth it.
The next day, we drove up to Anaheim and spent the day in Disneyland. We enjoyed our favorite rides and ate way, way too much sugar. For example:
Once again, like our last trip to San Diego, the fireworks over the castle were canceled due to wind. Bummer!
So instead we beat the lines to the kiddie rides!
We were tired from a lot of walking that day, but returned to the Gaslamp Quarter to pack up, as we were heading across the San Diego Bay to our own little castle! But not as magical as this one!
