April 2022

This felt like a very busy month, but I didn’t make a lot of notes; the only thing besides the Disneyland Do-Over that I wrote down was that Annika decided to do a fairly dramatic haircut, chopping her hair to shoulder length — and of course it looked SUPER CUTE!!!! :-)  

As for Disneyland: As much as we love the Mouse’s House the normal way, traveling with the Patels was even more fun! We took the same flight and took up a whole van together, so even the ride from the airport was a good time. Things were a lot different with Genie+ — it still is worse than the old MaxPass, and there was no Early Entry, but between the two families, we were better able to game the lines and systems. The first day, we failed to get on Haunted Mansion (long lines and breakdowns), and Pirates of the Caribbean was closed for the duration, but lucked into getting on Luigi's Rollickin’ Roadsters the day before a refurb shutdown. We were first on RSR + and had fun racing the Patels. Monday night, the long day + stress + HM failure led to a stereophonic meltdown as we were looking for dinner — both kids lost their shit ENTIRELY, and the only reason R. and I didn’t lose ours was that we didn’t want to be recorded on people’s phones and sent all over the god damned internet — we were close to cancelling everything and going home. BUT — eventually everyone rallied, we got to see Cars Land at sunset (my favorite thing!). We finally rode the sailing ship Columbia, which was really neat, and we all did the around-the-park train ride. The eight of us got chosen to open DCA on Wednesday, and ended up closing DL & DCA on Thursday — nobody in the park but us, it was glorious! Going back to school after that break was quite a slog, but we had had a marvelous time.