Keeping up with the Yates Family: Disneyland

Travis and I decided late last year that we wanted to surprise Merrick with a trip to Disneyland for his 6th birthday. After lots of research and planning, we got a trip booked in early January. Lucky for us, the Handasyde family wanted to join us, which made the trip planning that much more fun! Darryl and Rebecca told Dakota that she was going to Disneyland about a month before the trip. Merrick took the news like a champ and was even excited for Dakota when he found out that she was going to get to stay the night with us before the trip and that we would take them to the airport in the morning.

We had a 6:50 am flight, which meant an early rise time for all of us. Merrick wasn't quite awake when we told him the news that he was going to Disneyland and it took a few minutes for the news to sink in. He quickly ran and told Dakota that he was going with her. The first excitement of the day was finding out that we were going to ride in a taxi to the airport. I honestly think Merrick might have been just as excited about the taxi as he was about going to Disneyland.

Merrick & Dakota at the Orange County Airport sporting their "I'm with Goofy T-shirts" and custom Mickey and Minnie bags

The nice thing about an early morning flight was that we got to our hotel and dropped off our bags by 10:00 in the morning, which meant we had a full day at the park. The first small hiccup in the trip was that the computer system at Disney was down. Not a big deal if you have your confirmation paperwork with you to show that you have purchased tickets (unfortunately we did not). Fortunately, they took our word for it and gave us tickets to the park. How's that for customer service? Travis was our navigator for the trip and had his handy phone and disneyland app that told him what the wait time was on all the rides. We decided to ease into things and hit the Jungle Cruise first. The only problem was our little boat ride turned into a short version of Gilligan's Island. What was supposed to be about a 7 minute tour, turned into a 20+ minute tour as they had some malfunctions on the ride. When we finally made it back to the dock, they gave us extra fast passes (for those of you who don't know what a fast pass is, it's like a golden ticket that gets you to the front of the ride line). Again, Disney came through on the customer service front.

The crew on the tea cups

I could bore all of you with the play by play details of our trip, but I'll save both you and I the time. I will bore you with lots of pictures, which as they say... are worth a thousand words. If you really want details, the next time I see you, be sure to ask. What I will say is that we had a wonderful time. I would say it was probably the best family trip we've been on and we created lots of memories.