Woke up to a cloudy overcast day, low temperatures and dampness in the air. What’s going on California?
Up at 8 am and looking forward to the “excellent de-luxe buffet breakfast” as promised in the motel publicity brochure. As we all know, America is the home of the Buf-feh and I’m hoping this one will be rivalling those we had in Florida a couple of years ago. It’s served until 9 am so we decided to go down about 8.45 am only to find that everyone else had the same idea. The breakfast room was just a self-serve pick-up point for you to get your breakfast so that you could then take it to your room or wherever to eat it. The trouble was, the breakfast room was ridiculously small.
Have you ever tried to get 20 plus people into a broom cupboard along with a small counter, various machines dispensing cereal, coffee, fruit juices and one surly foreigner handing out things like blueberry muffins, Danish etc (only one item per guest please) while jostling for position at the tray counter which has just run out of trays and the surly foreigner has disappeared so you can’t ask for more trays or get any muffins?
Well OK, maybe you have. Probably the last time you were round to dinner at our place, but apart from that, have you? It was hell. When I asked for a tray the surly foreigner gave me a shallow cardboard box which Emma noticed still had the remnants of the previous owners food and coffee swilling about in the bottom. We took what breakfast we could get and retired to our room to eat it.
I was covered in bruises from the jostling at the coffee machine and had a sore shoulder after challenging a little old lady to arm-wrestle over a chocolate muffin so I had a lie down while the others ate and the two girls continued to get ready to go out.
Considering that they had been getting ready constantly ever since they’d got up I was intrigued to see what else they could possibly do but two fourteen year old girls can get ready for England and for as long as you let them, believe me. When you think they’re all finished they start all over again. I didn’t even know we had a mirror in the room until it was time to go out and then, miraculously, it came into view as we were leaving the room.
Even though we’re only a few blocks away there’s a shuttle bus to the Disney parks. We used it as it saved on car parking fees at the park and do we need to save money whenever we can. The holiday’s costing an arm and a leg as it is. There are two Disney parks now, the original Disneyland and a newly opened park called California. The girls have decided they want to do Disneyland today and although both of them have been to Euro Disney and Emma’s been to Disneyland Florida that doesn’t seem to matter a bit. They’re still really excited about doing it all again.
By the way if you’re not planning to visit Disney there’s absolutely no reason to come to Anaheim. You might as well give the place a miss, it hasn’t an ounce of interest in itself.
The man driving the shuttle bus said something over his microphone for about two minutes. Don’t know what the hell he said but he seemed to be enjoying himself.
Pauline and Emma can’t take any of the really fast rides so it made a change for me to have someone to go on them with. Sophia loved them so while Emma and Pauline did all the rides that weren’t handing out paper bags at the entrance, Sophia and I threw our innards around on the ones that were.
While Emma and Sophia were queuing for a ride and Pauline had a sit down I wandered across to where I could see a large crowd of people milling about. It turned out to be the audience for an open-air concert “The Fab Four – A Tribute To The Beatles”. The audience were going wild. All these young Americans jumping up and down, dancing, screaming, whooping and generally being their normal introverted selves while I stood there slightly bemused at the reaction.
The tribute band looked nothing like the Beatles really but to be fair with a little bit of deduction you could actually tell which ones they were supposed to be. Ah, bloke playing the drums eh? Must be Ringo. Now let’s see, bloke playing a left-handed violin bass, I think that must be Paul. The music was average, they sang flat a lot of the time but the crowd didn’t care. The Beatles were obviously still as popular in the US now as they were in the sixties.
Wandering around the park I was always on the lookout for the usual number of freaks and fatties that you always get in this country when I saw a hugely fat woman with orange dyed cropped hair rumbling towards me. She was wearing one of Giant Haystack’s cast-off wrestling outfits that suited her in a bizarrely strange way. Big, shapeless, baggy linen top with a ragged hole cut out for her head and two more cut out for her arms, set off by billowing linen trousers cut off haphazardly below the knees and the whole look finished off with a pair of black clumpy trainers. A vision of loveliness I wanted to capture on video for posterity, plus of course, I wanted to have a good laugh when I got back home.
Before I could get the camcorder organised she’d disappeared into the crowd (not an easy thing for her to do really) – but she did.
Then half an hour or so later as we were walking down a ramp from one of the attractions, there she was right in front of us. I got the camcorder out and ran down the ramp, overtook her and rushed into the park area so I could film her walking down the ramp and eventually towards me. It worked like a dream until I forgot myself and shouted out at her, “Can you waddle a bit faster I’m running out of film?”
Pauline said, “Be careful, she might sue you.”
It was a good day. Emma won our “Spot The Fattest Person Today” competition and it was all finished off with the Disney version of Son et Lumiere. A story of Mickey against all things evil – wicked witches, dragons, wizards, Tony Blair etc etc. It was a really impressive combination of light, sound, water effects, fireworks and live action. It was all performed from an island in the middle of a huge lake and most impressive I thought, was the way that they projected video images of Disney cartoons on to massive screens of water spraying up from the lake which provided a moving fluid curtain of water upon which the moving images appeared.
Got the last shuttle bus back to the motel at 12.40 am.
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