Our big Christmas gift to our kids this year was tickets to Disneyland. We had the opportunity to head down a little early to spend some extra time in Southern California before the main attraction.
To break up the drive, we decided to stay a night in St. George. We were looking for a hotel for the night but ended up booking someone’s fifth wheel from AirBnB. It was cheap and convenient, but some of the kids (mainly the teenagers) weren’t too happy with the accommodations.
We certainly missed having access to the friendly confines of Gary & Kathy’s place, and it was always fun to hang out with them for a couple days on these kinds of trips.
Church with Uncle Matt
We got to Anaheim on Saturday afternoon and did some shopping and got ourselves settled and prepared for Disneyland from Monday to Wednesday. But we needed some plans for Sunday.
Thankfully, Uncle Matt called and invited us to come down to Long Beach to go to his ward (Long Beach 10th). We got to sit with Matt and his cool missionaries who have been helping him out.
After church we went over to Matt’s house for some lunch. We hung out and chatted for a while and played with the dogs. Then the missionaries came over and so we enjoyed some pie and ice cream together.
Hiking Griffith Park
Despite the rain in the forecast, we decided to chance it and try to go for a hike. I had one planned close to Anaheim, but Manina suggested going to walk up to the Hollywood sign. We had time to kill on a Sunday afternoon, so why not?
Manina had done the hike before on a girls getaway weekend with some of her friends and told us it was a pretty easy hike along a paved trail, “you can practically drive right up to it,” she said.
So navigated us up through the traffic and crazy downpours, but the weather started to clear as we approached our destination. However, she kept saying that this wasn’t quite familiar as we followed her phone’s map directions to the parking lot.
We got out and walked up the trail a bit to see if we could jog her memory a bit. The rains had stopped, and the conditions seemed good, so why not walk around for a while. We were in a bit of a canyon with poor cell phone reception, but we eventually found a trail map.
We were not prepared for a big hike, but from where we had parked, we had almost 3 miles before we could get to the Hollywood sign. The kids weren’t happy about it (mostly just the teenagers), but we decided to give it a shot.
It ended up being a great hike! We took a lot of pictures on the way up of the beautiful views overlooking the valley. And the weather played nice, getting better and better as the hike went along.
We finally made it up to the viewpoint (Tyrolian Tank) that we had originally set out for. We ate our remaining snacks, enjoyed the view, and took a bunch of pictures.
We made it back down to the parking lot right as it was getting dark. Our hike that was supposed to be super easy and short ended up going on for 5.64 miles and took us over 2 hours of walking time. We were all pretty exhausted when we finally got back to our rented apartment in Anaheim, but we were all excited to get to Disneyland early the next day.
MightyJohnsons 