Grizzly River Run

Grizzly River Run
A water ride (white water rafting) in round boats through rapids. There are signs warning that you’ll get wet & we weren’t disappointed, we got soaked – which was a good thing because it was so hot!

Soaring over California
A simulation of a plane flying over California – the best simulation we’d been on – very realistic flying feeling complete with wind blowing in your face and atmospheric smells (oranges etc) – and cool to see some of the places we’d been to (Monterey, Yosemite). Also nice and cool – great respite from the outside heat.

Mulholland Madness
A small roller Coaster with lots of twisty turns. Not exactly totally thrilling, but fun.

Orange Stinger
A whole lot of swings that go round and round. Not too exciting.

Sun Wheel
Ferris wheel with cars that swing down tracks. Kind of fun when the cars swing down and nice view from the top, but went on for a bit too long (in the heat) by the time it stops for everyone to get in and out.

Golden Dreams
A movie presentation of the history of California. Quite interesting, but not really very in-depth. Has a very long and boring ending montage. Nice and air-conditioned.

Aladdin
This was marred somewhat by having to stand in queue for over half an hour in the direct, extremely hot sunshine for seemingly no good reason. The actual show was pretty good – it was a live (somewhat condensed into about 45 minutes) version of the movie Aladdin.

Hollywood Tower of Terror

The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror
A great ride – basically themed as a possessed elevator (it has a whole complicated back story and plenty of atmosphere). Got plenty of screams from me.

Muppet Vision 3D
Quite funny – all the usual 3D tricks.

It’s Tough to be a Bug!
Another 3D presentation based on A Bugs’ Life.

However we still got into the park before the official opening, and hung around central area of the park waiting for the rides to open. It was quite a contrast to the crowds we had encountered at Disneyland – there seemed to be hardly anyone around. On the opening we headed for the big rollercoaster (California Screamin’) – only to be told when we arrived that it wasn’t currently operating (and wouldn’t be again until mid-October). This bummed us out quite a bit – especially since there had been no notification of that until we actually arrived there. Oh well, we got over that and worked our way around the park. It started getting really hot – it felt much hotter than 3 weeks ago in Disneyland. This wasn’t helped by the fact that there weren’t really as many shady places around as there had been in Disneyland – though at least a lot of the attractions were really well air conditioned. The queues were generally pretty much non-existent, though we did experience a few long queues – eg. the Aladdin show (there are only 3 shows a day, so queuing seemed inevitable, though not sure why they couldn’t have let us into the air-conditioned theatre to wait instead of having to stand in the under-shaded queuing area). The drop tower (Mailboomer) and the Grizzly River Run also developed rather long queues in the afternoon. We’d already done them in the morning, but were contemplating going on again – we waited for ages in the hot sun for the Mailboomer before giving up, but the queue had died down when we came back so we did get a second go.

At about 3pm we decided we’d done everything we wanted to. Our general impression of the park was that it did have some really good rides (Tower of Terror, Soaring over California, Mailboomer), but it didn’t really have the same atmosphere of Disneyland. Though that probably wasn’t helped by the extreme heat and our annoyance over the rollercoaster being closed and the big wait for Aladdin. We walked out to Downtown Disney for one last look (and a pretzel from wetzel’s pretzels) and headed back to the parking building – this time we decided to take the tram.

As we still had quite a few hours until we had to drop the car off (8pm) we decided to go for a drive to Santa Monica beach for a look around first. The beach was quite nice, it had a huge flat sandy foreshore, and there were plenty of people on it walking, swimming, surfing and running. We paddled our feet in the water and went for a run down the beach to the pier. Some big wildfires in the hills had created a thick band of smoke on the horizon – which had the fortunate (for us) effect of making the sunset quite spectacular.

We left the beach at about 7pm – the airport wasn’t too far away, but we weren’t sure of what the traffic was going to be like, so we gave ourselves plenty of time. This was just as well, because the traffic was very slow (we opted to take city streets instead of a slightly longer freeway route – that may have been a mistake). We made it to the Hertz depot before 8pm, then spent a good 15 minutes cleaning out the car and fitting everything into our bags (while we had tried to have them in some kind of order before we left Mountain View, there were still lots of lose items floating around). We got the free Hertz shuttle to the Air New Zealand terminal, then spent a bit longer trying to organise our bags into carry on and check in. After checking our bags in we refreshed ourselves as best we could, and had a dinner snack.

The plane was about 20 minutes late to take off, then took about 10 minutes to taxi. We were pretty tired, but managed to stay awake for the dinner. Brendan stayed awake to watch a movie, but I couldn’t see the screen at all, so went into a drug induced sleep and woke up in time for breakfast. Then we arrived back to a refreshingly partly sunny Auckland day (little did we know this would quickly deteriorate into many consecutive days of rain).

On the way out of Bakersfield we stopped to marvel at Oildale – a huge mass of oil wells spread out over the desert looking very alien.

The rest of the trip was a little bit more scenic and we crossed some mountains and then got into the start of the urban sprawl. Crossing LA took a while, though the traffic wasn’t too bad (considering it was peak traffic – early evening). We arrived in Anaheim at around 8pm and checked into the motel we had booked (Desert Inn). We then headed to Millies for dinner (Brendan had been planning this for quite a few days) where Brendan once again had his steak meal (I had bottomless soup, though one bowl was quite enough). After dinner we once again wandered through Downtown Disney for a bit of nostalgia.

After the cruise we had lunch at Pier 39 – clam chowder in a sour dough bowl. We cruised the souvenir shops on the pier and bought a few things. By then we’d had about as much as we could take of souvenir shops, so got into action to go and see some more sights. Brendan, Mum and Dad followed me blindly as I led them onto a streetcar to downtown, then on to a cable car up to China Town. We walked down the colourful main street of China Town, and then up to another Cable Car line. Here we found the Cable Car museum – the main junction of the 4 cable car lines where you can view the workings. We spent a little while here, then caught a cable car down the hill a bit, and walked up to Coit Tower. Unfortunately for Mum this involved another uphill walk – but at least the tower had an elevator. We extensively photographed the view at the top and headed back down. The consensus was that it didn’t look too far down to Pier 39 where the car was parked (it was all downhill), so we walked down rather than negotiating further public transport.

After lunch we went out to a shopping mall in San Jose. We watched Calvin play on the playground for a little while, then perused some of the shops. Mum and Dad have different shopping tastes (Mum likes to look at clothes, Dad at electronics), so this involved quite a lot of impatient standing around from one or the other of them for a lot of the time. Fortunately Brendan and I have interests in both, so we were kept occupied at all shops. A few of the shops were a hit with everyone – one was a shop full of gadgets, the other was the Discovery Channel shop (gadgets and other interesting educational type things). After a few hours we ran out of time, though had only seen one floor of the gigantic mall. We stopped at the food hall for dinner before going home.

In the evening Brendan and I fulfilled our ambition of seeing a movie that was not yet out in New Zealand (The Corpse Bride).

The Exploratorium is a big science museum containing lots of interactive exhibits. It was extremely interesting. A couple highlights for me were the robot cyclist (you have to press 4 buttons in the right order to make his muscles contract and allow him to turn the peddles around forward – a lot harder than it looked, but I got the hang of it after quite a while) and the reaction machine (see how long it takes you to catch a ruler as it falls down – unfortunately reinforcing Brendan’s opinion of himself as having super human reflexes). We spent about 3 hours there, and covered only about a half – we could have easily spent the whole day there, but the nice weather outside and the other tourist attractions of San Francisco beckoned. We were now faced with a walk back to the car, involving a 10 minute walk up the street, then 259 steps up a hill that got us puffing. Oh well, good exercise.

Next we drove towards Lombard St, the famous crooked street. We thought the easiest way to get there would probably be to drive up Lombard St itself (all the roads in SF criss-cross each other and hence go for miles from one side of town to the other). As we got close to the crooked street things started getting a bit scary as cars did wheel spins trying to do hill starts on the unbelievably steep road. I had visions of brakes failing, etc. but fortunately we made it up ok, and found a very lucky car park too. We took the obligatory walk down the bendy street, then decided that since we were here perhaps we should walk down the hill and catch the cable car back up. It seemed like a reasonable idea, until we got to the bottom of the hill and saw how many people were waiting to catch the cable car, so gave this idea away. Unfortunately this meant we had no other option but to walk back up the hill. I think Mum had had about as much as she was going to take of hill climbing by this time.

Our last stop of the day was the Painted Ladies at Almo Square. We found this locality without too much hassle, though finding parking was a little more difficult. Fortunately we found a park only a few blocks away, and didn’t have to walk uphill for too long to get there. The colourful Victorian houses with the city in the background as as picture postcard perfect as we had seen in the guidebooks, and we headed to the well worn patch of grass to take our own photos of it. We then went for a walk around the square (a grassy park with lots of exercising dogs) before heading back to the car – and then back to Mountain View.

We stopped in Stovepipe Wells and found the outside temperature a fairly warm (though mild for Death Valley) 37d egrees. Luckily we didn’t have far to go from the car into the nicely air-conditioned gift shop. After some souvenir shopping we headed on a little way and stopped to take in the desert atmosphere of the Stopvepipe Wells sand dunes. We walked a little way into the sand dunes to take some photos (and look for desert creatures in Brendan’s case), then got back into the car and cranked up the air-conditioning.

We then drove on to Furnace Creek, probably the biggest town in the valley. First stop was the visitor’s centre, which had some very interesting displays and books, so we spent quite a bit of time there. Then we moved on to the town itself, and we bought some sandwiches for lunch and sat outside under some date palms to eat. Unfortunately we didn’t have much time to hang around (we wanted to get right through the park in one day), so we got back on the road and headed straight to Badwater basin, the lowest point in the US (and the whole Western Hempisphere at 282 feet below sea level). It seemed to be that a walk out to the edge of the lake was required to truly appreciate this spot, so we followed the example of the other tourists and headed with our cameras out onto the mile long trek out to the salt flats. This is to truly experience the torture of wandering aimlessly lost in the desert. The heat was oppressive, and it was only the thought of the air-conditioned car back at the car park that kept me going on the way back. Brendan had arrived back well before me, so fortunately he had the engine running and the conditioning blasting.

We then headed back up towards Furnace Creek and up out of the valley to Zubriski Point. I was not overly keen to go back into the heat, but the stunning scenery of the unusual land formations at this lookout point was worth it.

That was our last stop for the Death Valley National Park, so we sat back and watched the scenery become more and more mundane, and then we reached the I-15, which was a bit of a shock after 5 days of natural, scenic out-of-the-way places. We arrived in Barstow at about 7pm, and headed for the Travel lodge, where we got nice rooms with free high speed internet access and cooked breakfast for a very reasonable rate – which is what happens when you get out of small touristy towns and into uninteresting cities off the side of the freeway. We had quite a nice dinner at the motel’s Mexican restaurant.

We then headed back through Lee Vining and further south to the edge of Mono Lake. This lake was at one time in danger of drying up because most of the rivers supplying it were redirected for the Los Angeles water supply. Conversationalists protested, and won their fight to save the lake. The lake’s most interesting feature are the tufas. These are large stalagmite type things formed by a reaction between the salt water and fresh water springs. The lake also has a lot of interesting animal life, including huge swarms of little alkali flies surrounding the edge of the water. I guess that sounds a bit disgusting, but they weren’t the type of flies that buzz around your head – they are quite happy just sitting on the sand until you come along and disturb them and they fly away in a swarm to settle somewhere else.

We headed south again and up to the Mammoth Lakes resort area. This is a ski resort type town – in the summer it seems to be a favourite place for mountain bikers (would have been great to have some more time to give this a try). We wanted to go and see the Devil’s Postpile National Monument. Unfortunately this required taking a fairly pricey shuttle down to the start of the walking track (it was closed to cars). There was a question of whether we had time for this, but I had my heart on seeing it, so reluctantly everyone agreed. We were the only ones on the bus and we got our own personal commentary from the driver. The ride took about 40 minutes, and fortunately the start of the track was down at a reasonable altitude (about 7000 feet). We had 30 minutes before the next bus, so we hurriedly walked the 2 mile track. We ooh-ed and ah-ed at the interesting natural formation and took as many pictures as we could before it was time to walk back. As it turned out we could have had another 15 minutes or so, as the bus did a bit of a loop through the camping area before heading back up to the car parking area. It looked like a very nice place to camp and Brendan and I resolved to come back one day to camp there.

We drove on, and decided to stay in Bishop, not go on to Lone Pine as we had originally intended, so got there at a reasonable time and found some accommodation at the local Super 8. It was conveniently situated right next to a “Jack-in-the-Box”, so we went there for dinner. Brendan and I had nice burgers but Mum and Dad were not so impressed with their salads.