When our oldest daughter was just two years old we took her and her eight week old sister to Disneyland.  They didn’t really remember it, so one of the things they were looking forward to when we got to California was visiting Disneyland.

A couple of weeks ago The Masters College had a special deal where we could buy a ticket to Disneyland for one day for $39 including a $10 meal voucher.  Obviously we jumped at the chance and used the discounted tickets on the day to upgrade to season passes (the cheapest ones) so that when family come (in the next couple of months) we can go again for minimal cost.

We started with a trip on the train to get the lay of the land hoping to stop at Tomorrowland and catch a ride on Space Mountain.  But while on the train we were told that the Tomorrowland trainstop wasn’t going, so we got off at Toontown instead. We didn’t stay there long because it was packed (the picture above is remarkably void of people).  All the characters were out and there were queues everywhere.  Actually that pretty much sums up the day – there were queues everywhere.  We ran into some other people from the college who have been about five times who said it was the busiest they had ever seen it.  We still had a great time though.

From Toontown, we went on “Its a small world after all” – which is a classic Disney ride.  There was of course a tiny display for New Zealand along with pretty much every other country in the world.

We went on to Tomorrowland, dodging the large stroller parking lots dotted around the park, and decided not to wait two hours for Space Mountain.  Fortunately they have Fast Passes at Disneyland which is free (unlike other parks), so you just take a ticket with an allocated time to return and skip past everyone in the queue.  These are good to use on the popular rides.  For the others, endure the 20 minute wait until your ticket time for the other ride comes up.  Speaking of shorter waits, the Buzz Lightyear ride was a lot of fun, and while the queue was long, it moved fairly quickly.

On the Buzz Lightyear ride, you get a laser gun and have to shoot all the servants of the evil emperor Zurg as you slowly drift through displays.  You get a score for each direct hit.  None of us did well, but it didn’t help that we didn’t realize we got points until half way through the ride.  Thats the price of quickly getting thrown into the midst of action!

We then went to Adventure land and waited in line for the Indiana Jones line.  We tended to have good queues (relatively speaking) wherever we went and people seemed to follow us which made the line much longer before we’d been there long.  The Indiana Jones ride was great fun, but Josephine didn’t enjoy it much as it was very loud and she found bits a tad frightening.

We lined up for Splash mountain, but after waiting 45 minutes the ride broke down and we had to disband which was disappointing.  We went and got some food and watched Billy Hill and the Hillbillies do a funny show in the restaurant where we ate.

Food is always expensive at theme parks, but Disneyland wasn’t too bad in our opinion, but we still chewed our way through more than $50 of food without any trouble.  Just as well we had vouchers.  The food is also better quality than you’ll find at some of the other theme parks (I’m looking at you Magic Mountain).

We stayed until after the parade, which everyone enjoyed.  As we were leaving the fireworks was going off, which the girls all enjoyed.  We had a great time during our first two visits, and we look forward to going back when family arrives.

We love getting gifts from home!  Since we’ve been here we’ve received a few packages from family members (Thank You Mum and Lisa) and two packages from friends.

At Christmas time, the Gaigers sent us a package which included some spectacularly kiwi t-shirts (mine was from Dannevirke! – see it here)

Yesterday I checked our mailbox for the first time in a couple of weeks (explanation in a moment) and found a delightful little package from the Birds.  And it included some kiwi chocolate and some chocolate fish!

But the best part was the enclosed letter.  It is great to hear about what is happening in the lives of people we no longer see every day (or week, or month).

So this post is to say a special thank you to Mum and Lisa and the Birds and the Gaiger’s for their thoughtfulness and to let you know that you are not out of our thoughts or prayers.

If you send something (even a letter) and it takes us ages to reply, it could be that we are just tardy about checking our mailbox.  Why?  As you know in NZ the mailbox is right outside your home.  In condo’s in the US, this is not necessarily the case.  Our mailbox lives in an apartment building of its own as you can see.  A second reason is we don’t get much in it.  We get two bills each month (power and gas), the odd thing from church (once a month or so on average) and lots and lots of junk mail.  So there is often not a great incentive to check it and as long as we get our bills paid nobody bothers us about it.

A note on chocolate fish.  Last night we were telling one of our American friends that we received some chocolate fish in the mail and they screwed up their face and said “Ewwww”.  When we think of Chocolate fish, we automatically think of marshmallow and chocolate.  They think of chocolate and cold, wet silvery fish.

[Amya - there is a place here to sleep if you ever come and visit.]

The Berggren’s have a good sized 30ft caravan (trailer as they call them here), that with a little squishing managed to fit four adults and seven children quite adequately.  They also squeezed a couple of quad bikes, trail bikes and an off road buggy in to the trailer to take along.

The Mojave Desert is an interesting place.  It is the home of the Edwards Air force Base which hosts the Air Force Flight Test Center (including the B2 Bomber) and has frequently been the landing site of the Space Shuttle – in other words it has a really, really long runway.  There is also a Airliner junkyard nearby that we drove past, with a huge variety of jets sitting around awaiting scrapping.  On the trip we also saw one of the huge wind farms that are out here – dwarfing the ones in the Manawatu or Wellington.

Where we stayed was also interesting!  There is a small town called California City (population approximately 13,000 according to the sign), and a few miles away there is an area that was set aside for a new settlement.  They planned the roads, and sealed them, but then abandoned the whole idea.  So today (I don’t’ know how much later, but I’m guessing 40-50 years later) these streets remain, and they are still unsettled.

However, they are not unused.  The roads, and the now many tracks that criss-cross the area are used by motorcyclists, off-roaders and whoever else wants a place they can get out and rip up some turf.  And the locals have cottoned on and charge a nominal annual fee for camping there.  As a result, several times a year groups of riders and drivers head out there to ride and drive.

This is where we were camping (Skylark Court) – you can see all the streets have names, and if you zoom in you can even see the tracks where the girls were zipping around on their quads and the buggy.

The Berggren’s buggy was great fun to drive, and Natasha had a great time driving (for the first time).

Josephine also got a composite bow and some arrows for Christmas and she had a great time shooting (with uncanny success) at her target.  The ground is quite rocky, so the arrows felt a little battered at the end of the day.

Staying a night in the desert was something Shelley had been keen to do, so we’ve ticked that off the list (as she says).  The desert was nice and warm during the day (around 25 degrees Celsius – probably warmer), and at night it got quite cool thanks to a breeze that went through the camp.  However, we lit a fire in a fire pit someone had built with stones and roasted some marshmallows while talking.

It was fascinating learning more about trailers (caravans) in the United States (which are quite cheap and very well decked out compared to New Zealand).  We also really enjoyed the time and hospitality of the Berggren’s and are grateful we could share this experience with them!

They’ve posted an account of the trip which features pictures of our girls playing with theirs.  I encourage you to have a read.

Dinner and desert were broken up by several games of volleyball which helped make room for desert.  There are a few more pictures of our get together on Grant and Kirsty’s blog.

So last Saturday and this Saturday (Christmas Eve) we went along and took some of the rides.  We had a lot of fun!

One of the “high thrill” rides we went on was the Goliath.  Goliath has a 225ft (five story) drop in it when you start off (and it is close to vertical).  This was one of the first rides we went on and there were no queues so we got to keep on riding until we were done.  For me that was two rides, but the girls enjoyed a third ride without getting off.  This is also a long ride – two minutes and forty seconds before you slow down (actually the first minute is the climb).  There is one part in it that has a couple of horizontal loops.  The combination of speed and centrifugal force leaves the blood in your feet.

Some crazy people have taken a video of the ride if you want to see what it is like, and there are some more pictures available here.  This was a fun ride, and we all enjoyed it and went on it again today.

Last sunday we also took Victoria Watson with us as a birthday gift to her from us.  You can see her in the photo above (if you look carefully) as well as in the one below. The photo below is from the ride Scream which was another “high thrill” ride that we all enjoyed (although not quite so much for us oldies after Goliath).

Six Flags license Warner Brothers and DC Comics characters which means that you have characters hanging around in costume that you can have your photos taken with (it’s funny watching Batman heading to the bathroom), as well as areas that are set up based on these themes.  Magic Mountain has a couple of themed areas.  There is a cartoon based park for smaller kids (complete with a Roadrunner express roller coaster), and also a number of rides and an area modeled off DC Comics rides.

Danielle loves DC Comics Characters, and so she really enjoyed looking around and going on these rides.  Some of our favorite DC Comics rides were the Batman, the Green Lantern and the Riddlers Revenge.

The Riddlers Revenge is a standing ride – you stand up, and are locked in place for the ride in the standing position.  This poses some challenges as the harnesses adjust based on your height.  If you are too light (as some of our girls were, you can’t get the harness down easily so that you can put your feet on the floor.  This resulted in Natasha dangling there for the duration of the ride.  She was sitting next to a guy who had no problem making the seat go down and was testing out the crouching position when the harness locked – so he was stuck there for the ride and he felt quite awkward about it from the gesturing he was making - which was quite funny to watch.

On our second day (today) we made sure that we went on some that we hadn’t been on before.  So the first ride was the X2 which is generally regarded as the most intense rides in the park.  The movement is similar to the Green Lantern except that you are on a full course coaster with onboard music, fire, mist and whatever else they decide to have working on the day.

Our strategy is to get there as soon as possible after opening and stay as long as we can before we get too hungry.  Food at the park is crazy prices ($13 for a burger and fries) so we tend to call it a day around 3-4pm and got and eat before heading home.

Overall our favorite rides were the Ninja, the Gold Rusher and the Jet Stream – the only water ride open at the moment.  I think we will get our moneys worth out of these season passes!

The visit was instigated by a requirement for my Biology class, so I took a number of photos and notes along the way.  Some of these (though not all) are included in this post.

One of the first things we saw as we walked in were Black Swans.  This was a nice reminder of home where they are fairly common and a reminder that these are not common in the Northern Hemisphere.

One of Shelley’s favourite animals, the Capybara is also here.  These are the largest rodent in the world, living around wetlands in central and south America.  There were only a small group here, although they normally live in large family groups in the wild.  In general there were fewer animals in many of the exhibits than is found in Wellington.

There were also some Vultures – who seemed to like having their photos taken.  Vultures live in groups of up to 1000 pairs which is quite an overwhelming number of vultures if you happen to be on your last legs in the Serengeti Desert.  There were also a couple of California Condor’s there.  We’ve never seen these before (nor Vultures for that matter), so this was nice.  These birds have a massive nine foot wingspan.  In perspective that is wider than the height of Danielle and Josephine combined as they found when they compared themselves to a life size picture of one.

They had a Dwarf Caiman (think tiny Crocodile about three feet long – fully grown).  It was sharing an exhibit with some turtles who did not seem at all concerned with its presence.  I guess turtles make for difficult eating for a small Caiman.

We got there in time to hear from one of the Gorilla handlers after she had given the Gorilla’s a snack.  Apparently male Gorilla’s spend a lot of time just sitting around in order to conserve their energy for defense of the family if they need to.  The handler also spoke about their nesting behavior – they make a new nest each night, and each nest is quite different according to the preferences of the individual Gorilla.  Male Gorillas have no easily discernible differences from females when young until the male develops his silver coloured back as they mature.  The zoo had two males in a Bachelor troop.

The girls (of course) were intrigued by the old favourites – Meerkats and Otters.  There were only a few Meerkats here.  Wellington has a better Meerkat enclosure from a  viewers perspective, although I suspect the meerkats here are happier overall with their larger enclosure.

There are many more Otters here than in Wellington, and they were very interesting to watch as they communally relieved themselves, constantly fascinated with each others output (if you want to be intrigued by this behavior, take a look at the video I took). They were also playing with each other and responding to the odd “otter-like” human visitor.

The entire visit took us about two and a half hours – we weren’t rushing either – it is a small zoo, but very nice with views over the Pacific ocean and nice areas for the children to play while parents just hang out.

It turns out that over time, if you are a geek, you tend to accumulate lots of websites/blogs/email addresses and RSS feeds to go with them all.  I’m trying to cut my habit down to the ambitious number of just two – my own one for random stuff and one for the family while we are here.

What does this mean?  It means that if you subscribe via email or RSS you will need to resubscribe (sorry).  You can subscribe to this feed here.  If you subscribe via email you’ll have to enter your email address again here.  If you continue to subscribe to this feed, you’ll find that you get content from my personal blog instead of this one.  My personal blog will be much more random and will have theological content (I’ve migrated the content from http://bible.geek.nz to http://da.rryl.me) as well as technology and general commentary on whatever.  If you don’t want all that, then click the links above to stay on this channel.

And now back to your regularly scheduled broadcast…

The evening is a night of a variety of types of music (with no Rap). Not being from the United States we hadn’t come across handbells before (but they are very popular here), and we were treated to a couple of great pieces with handbells – done very impressively. We all sang the twelve days of Christmas, with groups of two or three tables each taking one of the days and singing and acting it out. Our table was assigned ten lords leaping, so we had to leap up and down whenever that line was sung (I was glad we weren’t five golden rings or one of the other early numbers).

There were also ten piano’s each being played by two people (add that up and you have a lot of fingers) – which were all played together so well that you could only hear one melody.

Most people’s favourite part was when the choir spread themselves throughout the audience and sang an acapella song. It was great hearing the voices all around you rather than just in front of you.

The final chorale was also good, which was Vivaldi’s Gloria followed by the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah. I recorded a little bit of the end and have posted it here. The quality isn’t great, but if you can get along, you’ll enjoy it.

Tickets are $12 and it runs for the next few days. Buy your tickets from the Masters College website. It is a great night, well worth the money for the tickets.

We started in the East building which housed Medieval and Renaissance works. This section also had a great exhibit about the transcription of the Bible. Included in this section were quite a few really old Bibles and hymnals. The hymnal pictured here is pretty big (about 50cm high) and dated to around 1200AD. You’ll note that there are only four lines in the musical notation compared to today’s five lines. This helps with dating it. Musical notation wasn’t invented until around 1000 AD and originally consisted of only four lines. In addition, music around that time was largely monophonic (everyone sung the same notes – think Gregorian Chant). This particular one has some instances of two notes together suggesting that it was during the early movement toward homophonic music.

There were also lots of wood panel paintings (oil on canvas wasn’t popularized until the Renaissance) including some portable ones. There was stained glass, decorative peices, vases, furniture (mostly french), huge french tapestries, etc. There was also of course a good number of peices by impressionist painters such as Monet, Renoir, van Gogh and others. This is one of Monet’s paintings of the Rouen Cathedral (he did quite a few of the Rouen Cathedral at different times of the day) – this one is in the morning light.

At the moment I’m taking an introduction to Art and Music course at College which is quite enjoyable. I’m hopeless when it comes to music, but art has been something that my interest in has been growing in since I’ve been learning about philosophy. Philosophy is always reflected in art, and it is good to be able to explain many of the things I’ve been learning to the girls as we went around the gallery. My favorite part was the ancient Bibles. Seeing the many hundreds of hours of work that was put into these really helps us consider the importance of the work these scholars and artists did. What luxury we have in the printing press (and beyond) and modern translations!