Road Trip - (By Lori)

My wife wrote this story for my birthday – of course after all these years I’m able to see the humor of what was a wonderful and tragic vacation.

“ We moved back to Logan in May of 1993, it was the year Spencer turned three, so that is how I remember. We had been reading the Book of Mormon as a family and Paul had the idea that we could chart our progress and when we finished he told the kids we could go to Disneyland!!! It just so happened that we finished our goal about the time that we moved in to our new home. Not a great time to spend money on a vacation, but I told Paul that we couldn’t break that promise. So we went ahead with our plans. Paul came up with the idea to pay the kids money for every hour that they could be good in the car and not bother each other. It worked out great because you to give them money for souvenirs anyway. Well we had a good drive and several of my family members decided to tag along. We wanted to go to Sea World along with Disneyland, but my family didn’t care to go with us to Sea World so we went there first.

This is a great story. Ashley would have been just short of eight years old making Jayme 5 ½ and Spencer just past his third birthday. We had fun at Sea World seeing as many shows as possible. When it was time for the Shamu show Paul really wanted to sit in the splash zone so he coaxed the kids to sit with him, as usual I decided to stay clear of the splash zone. It is called the splash zone for a reason and so during the show Shamu came swimming by and did a jump right in front of the slash zone and sure enough those sitting in that area were drenched. All of the kids were crying and the worse part was that our video camera got drenched as well. Good idea Paul! Luckily it is southern California so even though it was October it was warm so the clothes dried quickly, but I did make Paul go to the car for some dry shoes and socks for the kids. Unluckily for us I don’t think that our video camera ever did work properly after being soaked in salt water.

The next part of the trip was also a memory. We met up with Brian & LeAnn’s family, Grandma, Grandpa, Donny, I’m not sure but I think everyone was there but Lisa’s family. Well anyway LeAnn had a friend that had gone to the character breakfast at the Disneyland Hotel so she suggested that we try it out. It sounded really great because it was only suppose to be about three dollars for the kids and a little more for the adults. When we got to the restaurant there was quite a wait and so we just sat there. None of us even looked at the menu or the prices. My mom and Lynette had stayed back at the hotel because they weren’t ready yet but the rest of us went. It was a great meal, all you could eat, Mickey waffles, hot dishes, cereal, fruit, etc. The best part was that the kids didn’t really eat much because they were excited to get in to Disneyland. There were a few characters there like Goofy, Minnie and maybe Mickey but really not as many as I had expected. When they brought us the bill it was like about eighty dollars, and they didn’t take a credit card. We had to spend the money we had promised the kids for being so good in the car! The next best part was that Mom and Lynette had seen a lot more characters at the entrance to the park than we had seen because we rode the monorail into the park. So it was overall a great trip, but we learned that you should never take someone’s word on the price of a meal without checking the price yourself, and you should not take your video camera into the “Splash Zone.””