1st January

Well I began the year absolutely exhausted and decided to have a quiet morning at the hotel. I washed some clothes, booked the shuttle bus to the airport, downloaded the photos, updated the blog and watched a little of the Rose Bowl Parade (which is apparantly quite big here in LA). Phil, on the other hand, battled his heavy eyelids and pounded the pavement in search for thrills and adventure! He arrived at the park and managed to do all the rides he had in mind at Disneyland that we had missed out on yesterday. We met up late in the morning and took a bus out to a local shopping mall. This was a Westfield and turned out to be much like the sort of shopping experience we had been looking for (ie, there were 6 toy stores and a food court). It was only half way down the road that I considered that January 1st in Australia is a public holiday and the shops are closed; have no fear, nothing shuts in LA (as long as you don't arrive before 10am)!

I should explain the story of the toy shops: Before Christmas we visited Phil's sister and discovered that her husband, Shane, is collecting the cars from the movie Cars. Phil got excited and decided to help out as Shane was having trouble searching for some of the collection in Tumby and Lincoln. We did manage to find 10 in Adelaide and have been on a hunt to find any others here in the States. We have so far had minimal luck.

By the middle of the afternoon we were still to make our way to California Adventure Park. Phil got there by 3pm and I wasn't far behind. We confirmed that California is much smaller than Disneyland, with about a third of the rides and about a third of the crowd! We managed to get through everything we wanted to do by the time the park was shutting down at half past 8. We then wandered back to Disneyland to do the Nemo submarine ride. This ride is the newest, and consequently the busiest; until this point, we hadn't seen it with less than a 90 minute wait. In the end we only had to wait about 45 minutes and it was worth it. From there, instead of going home, we found a few more rides. :o)

So it turned out to be another long and exhausting day, Phil walked for about 16 hours, but it was good and we were glad that we got through as much as we did considering the New Year's Eve crowds. Unfortunately another night to bed around 1am with an early start to pack up and be on the bus by 8am in the morning. We are looking forward to a quiet day tomorrow.

Highlight of the day: Phil's day of rides! #1 was definately the Californian Screamer! 22 rides today!!!