Many, many things happened today so I'm going to try to get it all straight and explained. First of all, our friend Kimmy and her boyfriend Eric were spending the next few days at Disneyland for Kimmy's birthday. We have known Kimmy since she was like seven or eight, I think, and now she's turning 23. Her parents opened the gymnastics center in Ceres that me, Lindy and Sherri all attended and that I coached at for a few years. As we discovered tonight, no matter how much time goes by, having spent all that time together gave us millions of memories and it's like no time has passed.
So, Sherri's season pass will be expiring next week and she was thinking that she wasn't going to be able to hit up Disneyland one more time before it expired. But lo and behold, Kimmy's trip/birthday saved the day that Sherri and I knew we had to go and visit her during her Disney trip. Sherri and I both had to work today so we didn't leave Redondo until about 4:30, which is about the worst time to embark on a Disneyland trip, and arrived in Disneyland at 6pm. Unfortunately the park closes at 8pm but as soon as we arrived the guy who we paid to park asked if we were there to see him or if we were part of some other group event. Of course we said we were there to see him [though he was like 60, but so what] and he laughed and then said because of that we were getting free parking. Score!
We headed straight to Space Mountain, then Indiana Jones and we actually found the perfect spot to watch fireworks - in Tarzan's treehouse :) It was virtually deserted and then we headed over to Haunted Mansion and by then the park was closing. Sherri and I had been dying to see the World of Color at California Adventure but had yet been able to catch it so we headed over to CA Adventure [they close at 8pm as well but the show starts at 8:15] and even though we were in the back and couldn't see too well, it was still really cool and of course the Disney songs were all fun to listen to.
After the show was over we headed to get something to eat at Downtown Disney and ended up at Tortilla Jo's where we had a great dinner and reminisced over the past and good times. We were laughing so hard at one point that we were all crying. Poor Eric was trying to keep up and was a great sport about it all :)
As we were leaving, about 10:30pm, we decided to do a bathroom break and then I realized that I need a picture for the day for my Project 365 app on my phone. We stopped sort of halfway through the restaurant and had Eric take our photo and then heard a guy ask if he could take a picture with us too. We were like, um . . . and then after some confusion, realized it was Uriel Padilla - a friend from Hughson at home and friend of my cousin's Matt and Heather. His wife, Karen and their friend Deanna was also there with Karen and Uriel's son Raphael asleep in the stroller. Now, the completely crazy and odd thing about this was that Uriel and Karen live in Arizona now and I probably haven't seen Uriel since about 2002 and can't even remember the last time I saw Karen. We used to all hang out together because we went to St. Anthony's Catholic Church in Hughson and did the Youth Group together and spent a lot of time together. It was honestly such a shock and seemed like divine intervention in a way that we actually saw each other since so many things could have happened for us not to have seen each other.
This is Deanna, me, Sherri, Uriel and Karen.
So, overall, our year of having passes has been quite fun. Sherri and I have gone multiple times, had two instances now where we didn't have to pay for parking [one was for Guest of the Day] and saw World of Color, plus saw all the Christmas decorations and have gone on all the rides. So much fun! Now we just have to decide whether to get a new pass for next year or not . . . something tells me we're leaning towards yes haha.
