First Family Vacation

Our family went on our first official "real" family vacation.  What constitutes a real family vacation?  One where we are all together and we just go to do something fun.  No visiting family, no going to look for jobs, no separation of interests.  We do EVERYTHING together with our family only.  For this vacation we decided to head over the Southern California.

After two extremely long days in the car with relatively little arguing, we were all very excited to spend a day at Magic Mountain.  Why Magic Mountain and not Disneyland?  Well, I'm married to Brad you know and he does have some very strong opinions, one of the most strong being that Magic Mountain is WAY better than Disneyland.   Here's Brad and Jordan, excited to enter.  Fanny Packs(we didn't know if we could bring in backpacks as there is a strict no food and drink rule here) really accentuated what great looking guys these two were!

It was a perfect day to visit.  Weather was not too hot, there were not too many crowds and we enjoyed the rides immensely.

Since our family has never visited an amusement park before, we probably should have started off easy with the pirate ship,

the swings,

the merry go round that you stand up on,

the flash,

or the bumper cars.

Of course, not thinking that any of our children would feel any fear we went for the biggest, baddest ride with the shortest line in the morning, full throttle. Well, as you can imagine, one of our children, Kenzie, didn't take to well to that ride and it took me the rest of the day to get her back on anything looking remotely scary.  By the end of the day though, she did conquer her fear, get on some of the scary rides and even enjoyed them despite the queasy stomach the big rides gave her.

My favorite ride was X2 while the boys and Brad enjoyed Lex Luther's drop of doom which had a free fall of 415 feet.  They liked it so much they rode the ride 3x.  Not me, I kept my eyes closed the whole time, just like Riley in these pictures.

Who wants to think about dropping from 415 feet, right?  Guess my nervousness showed a little too much because the young boys on the ride sitting next to me offered me reassurances the whole time. 

The next couple of days were spent at the beach learning to catch a wave with a boogie board.  Here, it was me that was the wimp not wanting to step in the cold water in the least bit.  I was content reading my book and taking pictures of it all.

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The rest of them loved the waves and the water.

  

So much so that on the 2nd day they did finally the initial shock of the cold water was worth it once you got used to the temperature.

 And while I'm smiling here I'm really thinking to myself:  I don't want to be scratched up by the sand.  Lift, lift!

We did have one mishap on the 2nd day.  Every afternoon around 1:00 pm there was a riptide that if you got caught in would take you further and further out.  Well, somehow Jake got caught in the riptide and had to be saved by a lifeguard.

After the 2nd day at the beach we decided we needed a break and went to the LA Zoo.  We had visited this zoo once before when Jake was a baby and decided that he needed to be able to remember the animals too.  

After the zoo we ventured out to travel back to our VRBO in Huntington Beach.  We hit rush hour traffic and tried to find a back way home and ended up getting lost...in LA...not such a good thing.  But in our lost state we stumbled across the LA temple where we walked the grounds and visited the visitor's center until rush hour died down.  It was neat for Brad to be there because this is where he first took out his endowments with his parents and Grandparents.

In the evenings, we would walk the piers and listen to the lovely musical performances of those trying to earn an extra dollar or two.  I don't think any of us will ever forget the lady with the triangle singing, "It's a small world".

On the return trip home we decided to take a side detour of the Grand Canyon.  This was tourist area was a great shock to our children as they learned what it is like to visit a world famous site.  Tourists, crowded in together, with selfie sticks taking pictures of EVERYTHING.  We got away from the crowd as soon as we could and decided to go on a short hike down the canyon.

Upon arriving home we were physically exhausted yet grateful we had the opportunity to escape together as a family.