Travel Log: Legoland and Wedding #2

We had a busy day today.

First, we made the pilgrimage to Mecca trek to Legoland.


It's a good thing we checked the Legoland website before we went. If we hadn't done so, then our trip to Legoland would have been very much like Clark Griswold's trip Wally World to in Vacation. It turns out, they're CLOSED Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the off season. (Aside: Actually, the reason why we went to see the Sequoias on the way south was because we couldn't go to Legoland on Wednesday.)

I was really glad we went. They had a lot of the old stuff we had seen before...

Lego Mt. Rushmore
(Yes, that's a giant Q-Tip coming out of GW's ear)

...but they also had a lot of new stuff, too. Here's some of the stuff they've added since the last time we were there.

NY City with the new Freedom Tower added

Las Vegas

In case you've never been to Legoland before, the displays above are by no means static. They have a lot of moving parts - cars driving around, helicopters with blades spinning, trains running, breakdancers dancing, bands playing, etc.

They've added a whole new section called Land of Adventure which is sort of an Indiana Jones themed place set in 1920's Egypt. Flashback to Disneyworld: Our favorite ride at Disney is the Buzz Lightyear ride where you actually get a laser gun to shoot at targets through the ride and rack up points. They added a very similar ride here at Legoland where you ride in a car and shoot guns at targets in an Egyptian archeological type theme.

Jeeps N Guns
YEAH!

(Okay, so it's not a Jeep. Someone tell me what a better name for them would be.)

When we came off the ride the first time, the air rang with a loud and repetitive,

"AGAIN! AGAIN! AGAIN!"

Then my wife told me to calm down and be quiet and so she could ask the boys what they wanted to do next. I bolted and ran back to the entrance and the boys followed me, so we went on it again.

Aside: One of the nice things about going during the off-season: No lines. There was only one ride we had to wait in line for (because they had it operating at reduced capacity due to expected low usage). All the rest of the rides we could ride multiple times in a row if we wanted.

Did I mention the ride keeps score?

LW beat me BOTH times we rode!

Oh, I know what YOU'RE thinking! NO! LW's score on the first run had absolutely NOTHING to do with my desire to go on the ride AGAIN. (Nice shootin' Sweetie! :-) ).

We went on the boat ride...


We went on the log ride...


We went on the safari jeep ride...


ES said he wanted to go on this roller coaster, but chickened out at the last minute. I let him walk back down the exit ramp to LW while I went for a ride.


There was nobody else in line, so the operator guy let me ride it

3 times in a row.

He asked if I wanted to keep going, but I said no, I should get back to my family. Each time I flew past my family sitting on the park bench, I made sure to scream like a little girl so ES would think it was horrible and he wasn't missing out on any fun. ;-)

We went on a bunch of other rides, but I won't bore you with more of the same.

We made a few pitstops...


Oh, there's also a 10-stage geocache in Legoland. We found all but one of the clues and I'll have to email the owner to ask about that one.

Each Treasure Chest Icon is a Stage of the Geocache.
The dotted lines are a "breadcrumb" trail that shows
where we walked in the park.

Then we made the mistake of walking into the store. Oh man, they had a LOT of REALLY COOL stuff in the store. I actually contemplated breaking out the roof-rack carrier to take home a Death Star and a Millenium Falcon.

Me checking my empty wallet to see if I can afford a Death Star.

Overall, a good time was had by all, and the boys even said that Legoland made the long car drive from Oregon worth the trip. Hooray!

Wedding #2

Tonight I went to Rich and Jasmine's wedding in Fallbrook. That was actually the reason for our excursion south to San Diego before heading east. Unfortunately, our friend Jen who had agreed to watch the boys for us came down sick with strep throat today. (Aside: I'm sorry you're sick, Jen! We're sorry we didn't get to see you today and I hope you get better soon!) So my wife stayed back at the hotel with the boys while I went to the wedding.

Rich was a stateroom mate of mine on the 725 Battle Wagon and we've been through a lot together.

They picked out a beautiful location for the wedding.

The happy couple.

The sword arch.

The cake was delicious!

Because I know some of you are interested in such details, here's the centerpiece. I think it was like a glass flower thing on the inside. It was really pretty - this photo doesn't do it justice.

Reunion of SSN 725 Shipmates

It was good to catch up with old friends and shipmates. Unfortunately, I missed the memo about the choker whites. No, actually, Rich called me to ask me to be in the sword arch about 3 days after the movers took my dress uniforms and sword away in a wooden crate bound for DC. DOH! I was disappointed not to be part of the sword arch, but I was glad the timing worked out for me to attend the ceremony en route to our next duty station.

Statistics for today:

399.99 Cost of a Lego Death Star

5.02 Number of miles walked at Legoland today (by GPS).

5,002 Number of calories in one of those pieces of wedding cake (probably).

WARNING: I probably won't write a blog post tomorrow and might not over the weekend. Tomorrow we're heading to my cousin's place in St. George, Utah, with a stop in Las Vegas for dinner with some friends. I expect we'll get in pretty late tomorrow night and be busy with family activities over the weekend. :-) Will write more when I can. In the meantime, I hope you all have a good weekend!

Weekend Recap

Friday night

Friday for Family Movie Night, we broke our habit of getting our pizza from Boston's North End Pizza across the street and drove over to Pearl Ridge Mall to get pizza from CPK instead. We had a Santa Fe Chicken pizza that was really good.

Our movie selection for the evening was The Princess Bride. We had been talking about watching it for a couple of days, and I was pretty excited. Before we watched the movie, I kept saying things to ES like, "My name is Inego Montoya. You keeled my fadder. Prepare to die." and "Incontheivable!" ES thought I was crazy, looked at me like I had three heads and said, "What?!?!" The boys really enjoyed the movie, and now ES has been going around saying, "You keeled my fadder. Prepare to die." and "Incontheivable!"

I think given how well ES took to this movie and memorizing one-liner sound-bites from the movie, I may have to break out Monty Python and the Holy Grail next. Man, if I get ES quoting Monty Python, LW will go absolutely NUTS. :-)

Lazy Saturday

Saturday for me was one of those lazy days you need once in a while to just sit around and do nothing. In the morning, we happened upon Mr. Bean's Holiday on TV and got sucked into it. The boys and I really enjoyed it. None of us had watched any of Mr. Bean's stuff before. There wasn't a lot of dialog - just a lot of slapstick, physical type of comedy.

Then we watched the new episode of Battle 360 on the DVR. In case you haven't seen Battle 360 yet, here's a segment on YouTube:



We also played a good amount of LIJ.

LW was actually much more productive with her day, to include sneaking a car load of stuff off to Good Will (she has to do it in stealth mode so the boys won't throw a fit over the toys she takes).

Both our neighbors' husbands across the street were out of town and didn't feel like cooking, so we invited them to join us for dinner on the lanai. LW made up some awesome mini-cheesesteak sandwiches for dinner, some sort of frozen margarita concoction to drink, plus some downright sinful pots-de-creme from this PW recipe.

Mmmmm... Pots de creme
(We forgot the whipped cream though)

Sunday

My favorite song on the radio right now is Song of Hope by Robbie Seay Band (click the song title to give it a listen). I'm sad though, because it has been elevated it to that ultimately popular status where they play it like once an hour and I know I'm going to be sick of hearing it by the end of the day. As much as I love KLOVE, I wish they wouldn't do that (play good songs so repetitively that they run them into the ground and make you sick of them).

When we went to church, they started off with one of those songs that in all reality is a pretty good song, but the radio stations have overplayed it so much that it's just like scraping finger nails across a chalk board to me (Heaven by Salvador). Luckily, they made up for it though and played one of my favorite and NOT overplayed songs after the sermon - I Can Only Imagine by MercyMe.

El Mariachi Mexican restaurant

For lunch, we made our third attempt to find the Mexican restaurant in Kaneohe that one of my JO's recommended (oops, sorry, I mean DO's - we're not supposed to call them JO's anymore). The first two times, we tried to find it just by using the address in the GPS receiver and had no luck. Today we actually called the place and asked for directions. The lady on the phone explained to us that they were tucked back behind the Aloha Gas Station on Kam Highway, across the street from the bank. If you happen to go looking for this place, that's an important point to remember because there are two Aloha Gas Stations right across the street from each other, so you need to go behind the one ACROSS the street from the bank.

El Mariachi Mexican restaurant is a very nondescript little hole in the wall. The fact that all the tables were full in a place so hard to find is a pretty good sign their food is good though, eh?

Atmosphere: Once you get inside, you'll find about 8 tables crammed into a small place with some Mexican music playing softly in the background. Most hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurants share the same decor - paintings of Mexican countryside scenery, a Mexican flag, etc. This place had some of those typical wall-hangings you would expect, but added a coat of textured red paint and some faux-brick wainscoting for a nicer appearance. Plus, it was cleaner than your average hole-in-the-wall type of place.

Food: Although they didn't have my favorite mole poblano on the menu, they did have a good variety of other Mexican dishes that I love like carnitas, chili verde, and carne asada. LW had the carne asada burrito - I tried a bite and it was excellent. I had the carnitas and it was also superb. The meat was tender, flaking apart, and flavorful. The guacamole was the smooth consistency of the processed stuff you get at other Tex-Mex chain restaurants (i.e. not made from fresh avocados), but it was alright. The drinks are served from a fountain (as opposed to selling you cans of soda). While it wasn't the BEST Mexican food I've had on the island, it was certainly a very tasty meal that I enjoyed very much.

Service: When we got there, all the tables were full, but we only had to wait like 5 minutes for someone to finish and leave for them to clear off the table for us to sit. Have you ever played that addicting game Diner Dash on the internet? I felt like I was in a real live version of that game. There was one waitress serving all 8 tables, but I thought she did an excellent job. Given how small the place is, she was never far away from any of us and easy to get her attention. She was working her butt off, but she did a great job.

Lego Sculptures at the Mall

After lunch, LW went to get a pedicure with the neighbor ladies from across the street. I had wanted to take the boys for a hike, but it was drizzling rain off and on with some heavy black clouds looming overhead. I didn't want to get a mile out and have the heavens open up, dumping buckets on us and turning the trail to mud (not like that's ever happened to us before).

Instead, I took the boys to see the lego sculptures display at the mall.

The boys check-out the hanging-man.
That gray tower he's hanging from is
all made out of legos, too.

ES and J check out the Parthenon.

Man! How do I sign up for THAT job?!?! I wish someone would pay ME to sit around and make sculptures out of legos all day. I couldn't do what he does with the curves of human forms, but I could totally do the parthenon and the other balanced shapes. Maybe when the Navy is done with me we can retire to Legoland!

This afternoon, I tried to be at least a little bit productive. When we moved the furniture around last week (when we thought we were staying in Hawaii for shore duty), I took down all the pictures hanging on my "me wall" because we wanted to put the entertainment center along that wall. Now that we're NOT staying in Hawaii and we have company coming at the end of this week, LW made up a new honey-do list for me, and the first item was to rehang the pictures. Normally, I wouldn't mind so much, but the aluminum frames in these houses make hanging pictures a pain in the arse. At least I got that item crossed off the honey-do list.

I started to write about wine-tasting tonight, but I'm going to save that for another post. This one has gone on long enough. If you've actually made it this far and read all of my rambling above, then please leave a comment - I'd love to know WHY??? :-)

Lego Indiana Jones

I'm surprised I've gone so long without yet writing about Lego Indiana Jones. ES got it for his birthday from Grammy. It came in the mail just before we left on our vacation to the Big Island, so we got to check it out before we left.

Now that we're back home and the kids are on summer vacation, that's almost all the boys have wanted to do all day everyday is play Lego Indiana Jones. LW has had to ration them and kick them out of the house to play and make a disaster area of our yard building forts and whatnot.

Lego Indiana Jones (LIJ) is AWESOME. Much like Lego Star Wars (LSW), it does a similarly hilarious job of telling the story of the movie without any dialog - just grunts and gestures and physical comedy. Through exploring LIJ, it dawned on me one of the reasons I liked LSW so much was the puzzle aspect of it. You have to figure out which pieces go where to unlock or remove the obstacles and progress through the game. LIJ has continued that puzzle-solving aspect and even improved on it a bit more. For example, there are more tools that you have to find and use in LIJ. Sometimes, a monkey will be sitting up on a wall holding the tool you need, so first you have to find a banana. If you throw the banana to the monkey, then he'll grab the banana and drop the tool.

Like LSW though, LIJ is very forgiving and playable by small children. You may not unlock all the bonuses or get the highest score, but you can still progress through the storyline just fine.

You can check out the trailer for the video game on my previous post here.

The new secret codeword: JUNIOR

Both boys had been outside playing with the neighborhood kids. ES and our neighbor J decided they wanted to come inside to play LIJ. They didn't want to say it out loud so YB would hear, because then he would want to come in and play, too, and unfortunately it's only a two-player game. So instead, they made up their new secret codeword for LIJ. They came in the house and declared they wanted to play "Lego Junior."

LW and I were perplexed by this and didn't know what the heck they were talking about. (The secret code worked then, right?) Can any of you figure out how they came up with that name?

In The Last Crusade, Indy's father (Sean Connery) calls Indy, "Junior." So instead of saying Lego Indiana Jones, they replaced "Indiana Jones" with "Junior" and called it "Lego Junior." I thought that was pretty clever.