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Shinku
11-06-2006, 05:01 PM
Oh man! What a trip this was! I am totally scrapping this trip and might be buying a whole new album for it. So much fun.

Thursday, November 2nd: Colby (the boyfriend) and I headed down to Anaheim around 4pm. Traffic was crazy! I am a native Southern Californian and I swear there must've been "the friday crazies" going around on the 57 freeway.

We arrived at the HoJo around 6:30 and checked in. Raymond was awesome! Definately some of the best customer service I've ever encountered. We were awarded a room on the very top floor of building one, and it was rather nice. We headed down to Sonic for dinner, and stopped by Target for provisions (bottled water and such for the in-room fridge). Digging through the discount rack, I found Nick and Nora pj's in my size for $4! Score! Colby also found a really cute shirt for $1. Double Score! We looked around target for pink duct tape (a vital piece of our Mouseadventure ensemble that we had forgotten to pack) but were let down. We headed over to Michael's and found not only pink but purple duct tape as well.

We called it an early night around 10.

Friday, November 3rd: We got up late (maybe around 11, I don't really remember) and headed out to the city of Orange. Why, you ask? To find CharmingShoppe! I had never been there before and was mighty curious. I would like to offer a secondary set of directions for those who have never been there before:

Head down (or up, depending) the 5. Get off at Chapman and head away from Disneyland. Keep going and going until you think you're lost, then keep going. It'll dwindle down to one lane each way, and you'll ask yourself if you're in a residental district and you'll still think you're lost. Keep going anyway. Then you'll run into a roundabout, nearly die twice trying to navigate it, and end up on the wrong side of the circle. Enter it again, nearly scream the whole way, and realize that nobody in California knows how to navigate one of those. Also question why it wasn't just a normal 4-way stop instead. It'll be ahead on your right hand side.

We parked and headed inside. It's small, but cute! Not bad small, just intimate small. Really cute stuff, for those of you who've never been there, you should go.

There was one woman doing some furious printing behind the counter, and we meandered through the store, throwing glances her way and casually mentioning disney and mouseplanetish things. We came across a piece in the back corner of a sorcerer mickey in glass and I said "I know someone online who happens to have this picture as her avatar....." and whipped my head around. There was no response from the woman.

After more unnoticed glances and remarks I bit the bullet and said "Are you on Mouseplanet at all? Cus I'm gonna feel dumb if you say no." Turns out? It's AVP. She's quite nice. Not what I pictured her like at all (not that I thought she wouldn't be nice, I just thought she would have really dark hair for some reason?). We chatted for a bit and headed out.

Colby and I went next door to this antique (? it was kind of a mix of antique and collectables) store and totally scored! We found original Disneyland LP's with unflawed jackets AND they still played.

There was some other stuff in this afternoon, including a mall, but I'll spare you from that. Let's just say I'm mad at the Nordstroms in Santa Ana (I think it's Santa Ana? We went to that mall with the big cube in front of it. It's some sort of children's museum. There's also a rocket ship in front too.).

Saturday, November 4th: We got up around 9:30 and headed back to sonic to get food for the MA picnic. We had like the most mentally unstable carhop. At one point she was yelling at us and throwing someone else's tater tots at us. It was odd, but the food ended up to be good.

We drove back to the hotel to park and walk to the picnic, and realized about halfway down the walk that we'd bought the duct tape, but never applied it to our outfits (Doh!). So in our team photo, the "Pi"rates of the Caribbean (as in 3.14159) don't have their pi symbols on. Please excuse the oversight.

We arrived at the picnic area and sheepishly took a seat near the exit while we tried to apply faces and screen names (me moreso than him). Rather than face the Wrath Of AdK©, I made a beeline to introduce myself to her and met Leslie (I'm sorry, I forgot your sn!) along the way! They are both incredibly nice. Anyone who doesn't meet Adrienne is missing out, yo.

We checked in, ate, met several people and headed on our merry way.

---

More to come, also a photo update when I can upload them.

adriennek
11-06-2006, 05:10 PM
We arrived at the picnic area and sheepishly took a seat near the exit while we tried to apply faces and screen names (me moreso than him). Rather than face the Wrath Of AdK©, I made a beeline to introduce myself to her and met Leslie (I'm sorry, I forgot your sn!) along the way! They are both incredibly nice. Anyone who doesn't meet Adrienne is missing out, yo.

Ahhh, that was totally worth slipping you a five ;) :D AVP actually called me to tell me you stopped by! I was absolutely tickled that you introduced yourself! It's my favorite part of MouseAdventure - getting to put faces to names! :) I'm anxious for the rest of your report!

Adrienne

AVP
11-06-2006, 05:47 PM
There was one woman doing some furious printing behind the counter, and we meandered through the store, throwing glances her way and casually mentioning disney and mouseplanetish things. We came across a piece in the back corner of a sorcerer mickey in glass and I said "I know someone online who happens to have this picture as her avatar....." and whipped my head around. There was no response from the woman.That's the other way to tell the Adriennes apart - I'm the deaf one. ;)

Seriously, I actually heard the word "avatar" at one point, but I had a printer running right next to me and I didn't want to actively try to listen in on what appeared to be a private conversation.

But I'm really glad you stopped in. (And if you think the current store is small, you should have seen the old one...)

AVP

cstephens
11-06-2006, 05:52 PM
Not what I pictured her like at all (not that I thought she wouldn't be nice, I just thought she would have really dark hair for some reason?).

A dark-haired Adrienne? Now where would one find one of those?

(running and ducking)

So, didja get out of there with any money left in your wallet, or were you like the rest of us who just leave our credit card number on file there?

Shinku
11-07-2006, 01:57 PM
Hehe! No, actually, I did not buy anything at CharmingShoppe this time around (tight budget) but I will bring money next time. Too much cute stuff in there.

Anywho!

So after the picnic we walked back to the hotel and cooled off for a little bit, then headed out to South Coast Plaza. Again, I got angry in a nordstroms, but this time for different reasons (I refuse to spend money at a place where I am ignored, and then talked down to. Nuh uh.).

After the fancy mall, we were starving (it was dinner time) so we jumped on the 405 and headed back towards anaheim. I took Colby to his first Hooters. That's right, I took my boyfriend to Hooters. Moreso, he was reluctant to even go! Talk about role reversal, eh? The food was pretty good and there was no wait, so we were happy.

We parked at the hotel and walked to disneyland to hit a few rides and take in some details before the game. I had intentionally not ridden pirates since its upgrade because I wanted to ride it with him for the first time, so we headed there. I may be voicing an unpopular opinion here, but I dislike the upgrades. It seems like they focused on the new things too much and not enough on matching it to the old stuff so there seems to be a big gap between the two (namely on audio quality). I hope this is somewhat temporary. It just doesn't feel like pirates anymore.

We had a 5 minute wait on HMH, which wasn't bad at all, and then a 10 minute wait for BTMRR. We jumped on Alice and then headed out.

Got back to the hotel, checked mouseplanet and our email about a dozen times. Tried to scope out our competition around the hotel (I am really curious who had the room across from the elevators, theme park view, on floor 7. I nearly knocked on the door to introduce myself when I heard the conversation about mouseadventure, but I figured that would be rude, so I refrained).

We went to bed around 11, the alarm went off around 6. We tried to get up at 6, we really did. We actually got up about 7. Lol, we're so not morning people. We got cleaned up, started taking some pics so I could scrapbook our adventure, only to realize that our camera had eaten our pictures (so to speak). The XD card decided to lose its formatting and thus was unable to recognize it or if there are even pictures on it. We were very, very upset. Thankfully this was not the camera we were going to use for MA, but it was very upsetting to lose our vacation-y pics as well as the Mickey's Halloween Treat pics on there.

We checked out and went to Mimi's for breakfast. Delicious! I think our waitress was to embarassed to ask why I was cutting up pink duct tape with my swiss army knife at the breakfast table, but at least we got our pi symbols on this time!

More to come.

Bytebear
11-07-2006, 03:11 PM
I love hearing out of towners describe their trips. All the landmarks of my commute to work (Hooters, the Science Center cube, Nordstrom) come to life through anothers eyes. Wonderful.

(oh, and no, I am not a Hooters regular, it just has a very visible sign from the freeway)

adriennek
11-07-2006, 04:21 PM
Got back to the hotel, checked mouseplanet and our email about a dozen times. Tried to scope out our competition around the hotel (I am really curious who had the room across from the elevators, theme park view, on floor 7. I nearly knocked on the door to introduce myself when I heard the conversation about mouseadventure, but I figured that would be rude, so I refrained).

Hee heee. I know whose room that was...

Adrienne

Shinku
11-07-2006, 05:42 PM
Here are some photos! (http://www1.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=138311192/a=60998570_60998570/t_=60998570) It is what I could salvage off of my camera, we are still hoping to get the rest of the photos off of Colby's camera (fingers crossed).

In one of the photos (while we were in the Buzz lightyear line) there is another team in the background, anyone know who it is?

Okay, carrying on.

Sunday morning, continued: We tried to park in the Timon lot, but it was closed, so they re-routed us and it took longer than we expected. We got a really, really good parking spot in Mickey and Friends, but unfortunately we were late to the group photo. We ran and missed the picture by seconds. We were so bummed!

Colby picked up our packet and we headed into the park. We snagged a seat at the tables near the lockers along with a few other teams. It must've looked mighty silly to the regular park patrons to see all of us with armbands on furiously scribbling on pieces of paper. :rolleyes:

I'm not sure who it was that came by and talked to us (with the video camera) or who came by with the still camera, but yay! We're nearly famous! lol.

Whomever decided sudoku was fair? I dislike you greatly. I should never have to use math in my adult life, at least, not that kind. That was awful. Colby had never done sudoku, so it was left up to me. We gave up. I got close, but then increasingly frustrated, so we gave up.

Thankfully, all my endless hours playing VMK had finally payed off! I knew all the answers to the fantasyland VMK quest so we didn't even have to set foot in that direction. Colby filled in the shady-ma-jigger and we were very stoked that we had pretty much finished that one. We ran to the opera house to do the quest about Goofy clocking in on time. When we read the question, we assumed that we had to come back at noon and that Goofy was actually going to show up (the directions said that the opera house had some sort of involvement, we assumed it meant they'd bring Goofy out). That was a costly mistake.

From the opera house we went to the hub, did the eye-spy there, and headed into frontierland. The plaque quest was difficult! We thought the plaques would directly line up with the lines on the next page, but we were dumb (and wrong). We took a picture of the plaque to work on it while we had some freetime travelling to other quests. We ran inside and did the next two eye-spies. From there we found the fry cart (which was an answer to one of the letters on the cryptogram). Then we travelled to Small World to do that eye-spy and get the Toontown signs. We actually missed one of the signs (with the dog? or some sort of seal on it? I'm not really sure), but I still did most of the word-find. I missed one important word in it, however, and thus our photo ended up to be wrong (we took the pic with the white rabbit in the hub, not the other one).

We went into adventureland, tried to fit the names with the sudoku puzzle to the names on the walls in the queue in pirates but that line was outrageously long and we felt bad for looking like line jumpers, so we thought that couldn't be right. We did the cryptogram in the waiting area of the Columbia/Mark Twain. We got that pretty quickly, it was fun! We ran to Buzz to do that, and lemme tell ya, it was incredibly difficult not to shoot everything in sight. Also, we found out if you just fire your gun, every third shot gives you 100 points. Our dumb "I shot you in the forehead with a lasertag gun" antics almost gave Colby too high of a score! Our picture ended up silly on purpose, it was fun.

We next went to the corn dog cart, which was delicious, btw. I'm glad I ran to the other side to take the picture. From there we rode Snow White and took our photo there. We tried to find the knight in Fantasyland (I thought it was on the bathroom doors, I had forgotten they'd made them into cards instead of 'prince' and 'princess'). We had about half an hour left (and only room for one more photo on our memory card. Note to self-bring bigger card next time), so we headed out leisurely and got the picture of the golfer. We were slightly at each other's throats by this time (we just organize things differently, and I'll openly say that I was pretty bossy that day), so we stopped in front of city hall and apologized. Had we only known that the weathervane was right behind us!!

We turned in our packet and I layed down on the concrete bench thing near the tables. I'd been fighting off a migraine all day long and after we'd finished the game, the headache just came RAGING. Ouchies.

We talked to some nice teams (although frustrated). When we talked with an enchanted race team, only 5 invitational teams had finished at that point. Crazy.

We hung out there until it was time to head into the awards. We found the penguins from Mary Poppins out in front by the floral mickey head, and we took a cute photo with them (I look really happy for having a migraine, eh?) which will probably end up being our christmas card.

While we were in line we were offered sammiches by some very nice people (whom I can now identify as the club 33 wannabes, I believe). As we walked in, Andrew introduced us, but didn't put our team name with my sn. Hehe! The awards were fun, except that my lovely bf doesn't know enough disney to feel comfortable doing trivia, so I was on my own for that one.

Afterwards, we got our media card and started heading out. Colby exclaimed "Holy <not family friendly word>!! Your short friend is getting felt up by the Brawny man!" He was referring to AdK and Doc Krock. LOL!!! We had to stop and say hi after an exclaimation like that. We chatted for a bit and headed out. We got dinner at Baja Fresh and headed home.

All in all, good times. :)

adriennek
11-07-2006, 06:13 PM
Afterwards, we got our media card and started heading out. Colby exclaimed "Holy <not family friendly word>!! Your short friend is getting felt up by the Brawny man!" He was referring to AdK and Doc Krock. LOL!!! We had to stop and say hi after an exclaimation like that. We chatted for a bit and headed out. We got dinner at Baja Fresh and headed home.

All in all, good times. :)

OH MY!

Err, uhm, was he giving me a kiss? We try to keep it family friendly. :eek:

The Brawny Man? LOL. Usually I refer to him as "the guy who looks like Mark McGwire" That one's new, LOL!

Adrienne

Crazy4DL
11-07-2006, 09:15 PM
Here are some photos! (http://www1.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=138311192/a=60998570_60998570/t_=60998570)

Is it just me, or do you have to sign up for an account to view your photos?

Shinku
11-08-2006, 05:43 PM
Let's see if this one (http://www1.snapfish.com/slideshow/AlbumID=138311192/PictureID=2616862746/a=60998570_60998570/t_=60998570) works...

lizzydq
11-08-2006, 06:04 PM
I was part of Club 33 Wannabes but I think I was in the bathroom when the sandwich offering was made. I was fighting a major headache too that turned into the flu. Blech! Anyways, I'm glad we were nice to you!