Honeymoon - Opening scenes

We were married on the 16th January 2010 just outside of our childhood home town.

We had the best day....

With that we made a promise to not do gifts for future anniversaries but to always try to travel instead. If not on the same date at least book something as the "present" flights/hotels etc etc.

I digress

...And, keeping within tradition, we were going on honeymoon.

Chronologically this will be the first trip report as I have decided to stock to the trips we have taken since we got married so for a bit of background... We have pretty much been together our entire adult lives - Carl was 18 and I was 20 when we got together. Before our honeymoon our only international holidays had been to Orlando with my family in 2007, 2008 and 2009 the latter was my 8th trip there and Carls 5th. Other than that Carl had been to Lanzarote and I had done 2 German exchanges with school.

I LOVED WDW and it would have been very easy for me to just book us a trip there. My dear husband decided he wanted to do something different, see the world he says. I was apprehensive, all I really knew was trips to Florida. I was out of my depth with planning/booking where to go etc etc

So after a lot of discussion and research we decided on

this one isn't my photo and came form a google image search

"But shelley - the cover photo" I hear you say and I know I know we'll get to that.

We were going to spend just over a week touring the country bathing elephants and having a gran adventure then a few nights at a top of the range beach resort to relax.

sounds fantastic right?

Well, things didn't go to plan. Civil war broke out. Unlucky us.

So we were back to square one. In the end we made the right decision really we had a fantastic time and it is still one of my favourite holidays despite some bad weather and a bad chest infection (!!! spoiler!!!)

So back to your regular Trip report programming.

...

We were married on the Saturday and stayed the night at the hotel in which we were married. Before we got married I had packed for the holiday and our home is en route to Heathrow so we left the hotel Sunday morning, drove the 90mins home, had some lunch, unpacked the car, repacked the car with holiday things and drove the 3hrs to Heathrow.

We had decided to stay at the Sheraton skyline as they were offering a decent rate with stay and parking.

Yes I put that we were on honeymoon on every booking, we didn't always get something but I figured it didn't hurt to mention it!

Look at the size of that bed!

Monday 18th January

We had an amazing night sleep ready for an early start I was up at 6:45 and Carl was up after I showered so we could catch the 8:15 bus to the terminal. Self service check in was very swift . We decided to use the UK money we had been given to buy a camcorder and some memory cards from duty free and had a bacon and egg sandwich for breakfast.

Boarded around 11am flight was delayed by 20 minutes. It was the quietest flight - we only saw about 10 other people!

We were flying with Virgin Atlantic and I believe the trip was fairly uneventful but we were delayed on arrival as they had to change the direction of the runway and we arrived in Los Angeles (Surprise! So yes we went with something new whilst sticking to a country we knew) (23:45 UK time) at 15:45 the scheduled arrival time was 14:55 from there we had to catch a bus to go and collect our hire car for the 2 weeks which was a Hyundai Accent. This was my first time driving in a foreign country and an automatic but got used to it quite quickly. It took a little while picking up the car then driving through LA traffic I was getting nervous we would miss our dinner reservation which was booked optimistically early it seems at 18:30. So we headed straight there

We arrived at 16:15 and were seated straight away. Our first meal was to be at Naples in Downtown Disney (Do you honestly think that we would go all that way and not visit the West Coast original?) I chose Italian - something we both love. Sorry no pictures. The issue we had here is that 6:30pm LA time was 2:30am the following day to our bodies so we'd been up 18hrs and once we were over the rush getting there on time and sat down we got very tired very quickly.

We ordered starters of Mozzarella sticks (him) and Calamari (me) and out came 2 dinner plates packed with the things! Honestly just one of those plates would have probably been enough for us both to eat that night.

I was able to find a photo of the Calamari on Yelp - thanks yelpers

I cannot find any photos of the mozzarella sticks but it was a similar sized plate as above piled high. Had we known we either wold have shared the mozzarella sticks. After the starters our energy levels were really starting to fall. For main we had Penne con pollo (him) and Rigatoni a pesto Gamberi (me) again huge portions. Due to exhaustion we weren't able to finish it all. The manager took the price of the starters off the bill as a congratulations on our marriage which we thought was nice.

Luckily it was a very short drive to our hotel where we checked in and headed straight to bed at 8:30pm (4:30am to us)

Tuesday 19th January

This has been wordy so far but photos are near don't worry.

Up at 6am and unpacked and got ourselves organised for our 5 night stay. The Virgin rep was coming to see us at 8 but due to traffic it was 8:30 so we had a very short chat and booked an excursion for the following day. As she was late she kindly offered to give us a lift to Disneyland so we wouldn't be late for our breakfast reservation.

Ominous clouds

We had decided to start our visit with a Character breakfast at Plaza Inn

The fairy godmother gave us some first visit pins. It was fairly quiet so the characters were able to circulate and we got photos with all of them

After breakfast we went out to explore this new to us park. It was so quiet everywhere we had managed to walk on to almost every ride before the heavens opened

And we went to meet Mickey, in the queue (I say queue but there was noone else there) we bumped into two of his pals

we rode and did as much as we could, despite being soaked through, until about 2:30 when we caught the shuttle bus back to the hotel. We each had a bath to relax and more importantly warm up and changed into nice dry clothes.

We took the bus back to Disney about 4pm when the Blue skies were starting to show

It was still very quiet so we rode as much as we could, the only thing we missed was Thunder Mountain.

Although there is a lot of cross over with Florida not all rides were the same. We almost skipped Indiana Jones thinking it was just a show like Fl. We were in Tomorrowland where there were 2 options for food and we chose pizza before going on all of the rides in the area. We then found a spot for the parade.

I have written it was "quite possibly the best parade we had seen for a while" although my photography skills lacked back then and I had a poor camera so most of the photos have not turned out great.

We left the park 7:30 and drove to a supermarket - we had a fridge in our room so decided to pick up some milk, tea bags, cereal, fruit and drinks. The cashier gave us discount because he liked our English accents. We were back at the hotel about an hour later.

There was a bottle of Californian Champagne in our room on our return compliments of the hotel which was nice. We washed our we clothes and enjoyed a glass of bubbly before falling to sleep.

Wednesday 20th January.

Up at 7 this morning and finished the champagne at breakfast which washed down our lucky charms quite nicely! We then went to the hotels deli to pick up 2 sandwiches for our trip. They were absolutely packed with filling!

We were picked up at 8:45 by VIP tours and taken to their depot for their Grand Tour of Los Angeles.

We headed to downtown LA and our first stop was Olvera Street - The birthplace of Los Angeles in 1781. The oldest house 'Avila adobe' built in 1818 showed us a typical house in the mid 1800s. We also so the mission where it all started

We drove through Chinatown and onto Hollywood where it really started raining

We stopped for 45mins and bought some delicious cookies and brownies for a quick snack

That is the camcorder in my hands wrapped in a ziploc bag for protection!

Back on the bus we drove through Beverly Hills and Bel Air - saw a lot of beautiful houses but also some very high walls and fences.

The next stop was a farmers market which was full of food from all around the world. If we had understood what this stop was we would have definitely not take sandwiches and bought something there. But our sandwiches were delicious and we bought a much need cup of tea.

Then along sunset boulevard through torrential rain and onto

This stop was a little boring for us early 20 somethings who had just gotten married and couldn't really afford those shops but also shopping isn't our thing and even with a bit more money now I doubt we would go back

The weather was so bad we couldn't make a stop at Santa Monica Beach so moved onto Venice Beach. We were supposed to have 30 mins here but we were back on the bus within 10, very cold and very wet

We were dropped back at our hotel around 5. Carl sat by the fire in the hotel lobby drying our shoes and reading his book whilst I had a short nap. We then did some laundry and lay in bed watching TV.

Although the weather was horrendous we still had a great time and got to see everything we wanted. It would be nice to do this again at a sunnier time of the year.

Thursday 21st January

Carls special day! When planning this honeymoon we decided we would each plan a special day for the other and todays plans were what I planned for Carl, well they tried to be what I planned for Carl...

Up at 6:30 and had cereal in our room ready for a drive down to Carlsbad. We arrived around 9:30 to find Legoland was closed for the day due to the weather!

They told us to try again tomorrow but we advised we couldn't so they swapped our tickets to no expiring ones which was nice. They also gave us free tickets to the Sea Life centre next door

We wandered around and had a coffee in the little cafe and left around 11:00. This was then Carls first time driving in the US and the weather was horrendous. We got back just after midday and went to the Anaheim shopping centre. Got some photos developed in Walmart and bought another memory card.

We had lunch at Wendy's - our first visit. Then onto Downtown Disney for a proper look around as this would be our only chance

Back at the hotel we went to the games room for a little while before getting ready for the evening ahead.

We left around 6 and drove to Downtown LA. Our destination was the Staples center where we were going to watch the LA Kings Ice Hockey team play the Buffalo Sabres.

We had nachos at the game. the 3rd period ended 3-3 which resulted in Penalties and the LA Kings won 3-2. It was well worth every penny and we would really recommend everyone takes in a game at least once. We left at 10:30 and decided to drive to Hollywood to see it by night and without rain. We got back to the hotel just after midnight and we had both had an awesome day despite the disappointing start.

Friday 22nd January

Got up at 7 and started getting packed up ready to leave tomorrow. We headed to Disney at 8:30. We had never done a rope drop before so this was exciting! A few things weren't open due to the, you guessed it... bad weather! We walked through the castle

We rode Thunder Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion and Indiana Jones before leaving the park and walking the short distance to

Disneys California Adventure. I love, I mean really love how close these 2 parks are.

And the downpour began. We fit in as much as possible including the scariest ferris wheel in the world

Mickeys wheel of terror

See!! (He was taking the mickey ;-) out of me here

We caught the shuttle back to our hotel just after 2 and changed into some dry clothes and warmed up a little. We decided to go shopping to see if we could find waterproof trousers and shoes (no luck, although we did get Carl a fetching pair of yellow waterproof shoes which I am not convinced he ever wore)

We checked out the new garden walk shopping centre

We weren't there for long before a thunder storm rolled in. we picked up more photos and filled up the cars fuel for the first time having done 285miles. it was $30.

Back at the hotel we did some more laundry and packed some more.

We took advantage of the $25.00 gift card we were given at check in and ate in the hotel restaurant. Carl had Spaghetti Bolognese and I had Stir Fry. Another delicious meal but another huge portion which we couldn't finish.

We caught the bus back to the park at 19:30 as the closing time had been posted for 23:00. On arrival we learnt the new closing time was 8pm (do I need to tell you why?) so commenced a mad dash for a few last photos and buying souvenirs

We were back on the bus by 8:15. Carl fell asleep almost as soon as we were back at the hotel. I finished packing and watched some basketball going to sleep around 9:45.

Despite the weather doing it's best (worst) we had an absolutely awesome few days. And these hardcore WDW fans had fallen for the original and it's younger neighbour to the point where after only 2 days in the parks we had a new favourite Disney location. writing this 9 years later I can tell you it is still our favourite and DCA is our absolute favourite park of the 8 we have visited. We were very much looking forward to coming back one day and already planning when that would be (We said 3 weeks for my 30th...did we? didn't we? That's for another trip report ;-) ).

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