Let’s start with the day before, shall we… After we made a critical stop to round out costume ensembles at one of the Halloween stores that pops up for the season, we returned to the LA Disney enterprise for a second round of fun.
Flight covered the California Adventures pretty well and already gushed about his home state, so I’ll just add a few photos to supplement his post.
We checked out a few rides, most notably California Screamin’ for Firebolt.
While the older kids rode with Flight, WoodSprite and I took in King Triton’s Carousel.
Just as Flight holds firm on his spinning ride abstention, I try not to embark on a bumper car if I can avoid it. I was much happier to keep my neck from jerking hither and thither and instead snapped a few photos.
We then checked out Radiator Springs and, with a 120+ minute wait to ride and no FastPasses to be found, opted to try the new Cars ride on our next visit. We settled for Luigi’s Rollickin Roadsters, which had less than a quarter the time commitment and seemed entertaining enough.
Our day ended up back at Disneyland with a few nighttime rides before we retreated to Davista.
I always like to see how the pros decorate for reasons I’ll delve into shortly.
Halloween is the holiday I enjoy most. Not for the distribution of candy, not the trick-or-treating business, not the dressing up, but there’s something in the shift in temperatures from the last gasp of late summer to fall’s crisp clarity that I can’t help but celebrate. Oh, and the decorating is so much fun. Last year was the first year I was able to carve out some time to really devote to that enterprise and I, um, got a little carried away.
Who knew there was so many fun projects on Pinterest?! I really couldn’t help myself. It helped that WoodSprite’s birthday party was a couple days earlier and we had thrown a Harry Potter bash.
This year’s holiday was bittersweet and somewhat subdued, all of us acutely aware that we were not in a decorated sticks and bricks house in our known destination neighborhood for Halloween festivities and, for the kids, not trick-or-treating with cousins and friends. It has become a tradition for the kids to watch A Nightmare Before Christmas as they inspect their respective candy hauls and set to bartering to improve their lots. A little sad to be without this:
Or this:
However, an overwhelmingly bright spot in our 2017 Halloween celebration was dinner with our dear friends in Long Beach who kindly had us over for delicious pre-candy collecting eats. Our monkeys suited up and were unleashed on the locals.
Inspection and bartering still ensued, but with fewer trades due to fewer than normal traders. And, instead of A Nightmare Before Christmas, game six of the World Series served as the soundtrack.
Looking forward to loudly playing “This is Halloween” wherever our 2018 celebration calls home…