I'm ba-aaaaack :)

My write up about the trip to Disneyland with Scott is finished but it is 7 pages long so I won't publish the whole thing here. So these are just my "final thoughts" about the trip.....

• Calgary airport bathrooms are way better than LAX bathrooms (cleaner, more modern, and more plentiful)
• Disneyland bathrooms are better than Universal Studios. Disneyland bathrooms are kind of sparse on the Disneyland park side. They must have learned a lesson as bathrooms are more plentiful and better labeled on the California Adventure side.
• Ideally, before booking your hotel, ask to make sure the shower head is more than 5 feet high. Anyone taller than 4½ feet tall will appreciate this.
• If/when I go back I’m not sure if I’ll stay at a resort hotel. The Best Western across the street was fine but a splurge on a resort hotel could be fun.
• The Disneyland experience seemed to vary depending on who you went with…
  - the young families with strollers were often moving slower and the little kids could only go on some small rides. They would frequently stop to meet the characters and watch some of the street acts. Some little girls were dressed up as their favorite Disney princess character.
  - the families with older kids had a much broader experience as they were able to get from place to place a little faster and the kids could ride more rides (often the minimum height was 40 inches) but they still stopped to see the characters and street acts.
  - the groups of adults (we saw a few large groups but there were mostly small groups of 2 to 4 adults) seemed to be there mostly for the rides and the shopping.
  - the advantages and disadvantages vary but from my perspective it was great to go with just another adult. It was certainly cheaper than going in a large family and easier to get a table at a restaurant with just 2 of us. And although I think it would be great to go with older kids that could enjoy the rides, we actually met some pretty cool kids on the rides. The Grizzly Bear Rapids (inner tube ride) was great for chatting with some kids about how much fun they were having and what they had seen. We also chatted with some families in line when waiting for a ride… we even ended up in line behind a family from Calgary! LOL
• The best time to go to Disneyland and Universal Studios is definitely the off season. There were a couple of rides closed for maintenance and the weather was cool (typically high of 20C but we didn’t get above 16C – but still better than Calgary weather LOL) but the line ups were extremely short. We didn’t have to use the Fastpass system (method of bypassing the long line ups) until the last day. For the first three days of Disneyland and the day at Universal Studios we never had a lineup longer than 20 minutes (most were 5-10… in high season they can be 2 hours or even longer).
• My advice for souvenir shopping… don’t buy anything on the first day. Every store in Disneyland has slightly different merchandise so you haven’t seen it all in the first store… or even the first dozen stores LOL. For kids who want to wear a Goofy hat or Mickey ears for the trip, it would be fine to buy the hat on the first day as they are pretty standard from store to store. But things like ball caps, t-shirts, mugs, magnets, key chains, etc that you plan to use at home are different all over the park. So I’d wait until later in the trip to buy them as by the end you’ll have seen most or all of them that are available and you can truly pick out your favorite one(s) to take home.
• Things I would like to have done but didn’t…..
  - I should have brought home more taffy and less fudge (I’m currently on fudge overload)
  - I still have no first hand knowledge of In and Out Burger. I’ll just have to believe everyone who says they are the best.
  - The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. You have to order tickets weeks in advance and it was way out of our way so we didn’t bother with it. But it sure would have been fun :)
  - We didn’t plan a trip to Knott’s Berry Farm but in retrospect we should have planned a day for it. Apparently they have awesome roller coasters and the world’s best fried chicken.
  - Six Flags is only open on the weekends during off season so we couldn’t plan to go there during this trip but I’d like to go at some point. Luckily there are many Six Flags locations so chances are good that I can go there in the next few years.
  - 7 days is the magic amount of time when the limit of stuff you are allowed to bring back to Canada duty free jumps from $200 to $750. If we were there just one more day I wouldn’t have had such stress about bringing my souvenirs back. Not that I would have come close to the $750 limit but $200 doesn’t go very far with theme park memorabilia prices.