Mighty Mouse

Some of my best friends in the world moved to Seattle the same time I moved to SoCal. We haven't lost touch as such, but what with them having another kid and living in another state and me having a washing machine, we don't see or talk to each other as regularly as we used to when I did laundry at their house. But we do get together at Disneyland. And it was so great to see them, and so comforatble it reminds me why we are such good friends, even if we're boneheaded about keeping in touch.

This trip was a family-friend reunion and so I got to see everyone I usually only hear about and some I haven't seen since their wedding a decade ago. My friends, their brothers and SILs, kids, nieces, nephew, and other friends from seattle who are our Disney enablers. The family volume also means we took off for a family friendly dinner - my friends, their 2 kids, her dad, her brother, his wife, son, and father-in-law. We descended on Sam Woo's and it turns out that it's not only my family that can devour like a plague of locusts.



The stuff right in the front is the remains of a huge appetizer platter of meat with duck, chicken, pork, jellyfish, and sausage. The rest of the food is the first round of entrees. The jellyfish looking things on the left are bundles of taro noodles on bok choi and mushrooms, there's also some chicken and veggies, the red bin of rice, shrimp... and this is after we devoured peking duck and before they brought the giant fish. The only thing left over was a bit of the meat platter, the veggie/noodle plate, and rice.

After dinner, my friend and I returned to Disney for the fireworks and a few rides and closed the place down. We got off the Pirates of the Carribean ride at 12:03am. And realized that the Matterhorn ride is very funky and extra fun after dark. Our friends got us fastpasses to the buzz lightyear ride and a Frontier town rollercoaster, so we got in several rides in the 2 hours we had available to counterbalance spending most of the day doing kid friendly stuff. (In Fantasyland, I kept getting distracted by how he fake painted mountains at the back edge made the real sky look fake while at the same time reminding me of the real looking fake painted sky in the Venitian in Vegas.)

Disneyland is a place that is very aware of the reputation they need to live up to, and they set out to exceed it. It's my second visit and I remain utterly impressed. Like Vegas knows how to get you to gamble away your money with a smile on your face, and puts on a show unlike any other, Disney is similarly on top of their game. You go for a runty little nightly fireworks show and they amp it up to 11. Tinkerbell flies over the castle (how cool is that job!), fireworks that look like cannon shot, around the square, overhead, Catherine Wheels - the whole nine yards and a little more. They theme it up which could come off like advertising, but instead feels more like an over the top round up of everything you enjoyed throughout the day.

And knowing that things are pretty much going to go how you expect gives you great freedom to enjoy the people you're with. Usually I avoid faces in my blog, but these pictures are too joyful to hide.