317/365 As one last hurrah before school started, I decided to take the kids to Six Flags Magic Mountain for a few days of amusement park fun. Yesterday, I laid out the budget, and today I will include our itinerary, detailing each day. Day 1 Getting an Early-ish Start While we didn't get as early a start as I had hoped, we didn't leave as late as last time. The drive over was fairly easy. I had packed lunch to eat in the car, so we only stopped for gas and bathroom breaks. Hyatt Regency Valencia We arrived at the Hyatt Regency Valencia in plenty of time to settle in, unpack, and head to the park. Our room was on a corner and designated accessible, so it was very roomy.…
316/365 I wanted to squeeze one more trip to Six Flags Magic Mountain in before school started, so we headed over to Valencia at the end of July to celebrate the end of summer! Today I'll share our budget and savings, and tomorrow I'll share our itinerary and what we did each day. Let's go! Entertainment As I shared in my trip report from Spring Break, my friend had convinced me last fall to buy season passes at our local water park since Six Flags was buying it out. Turns out, it was a great value because your Gold Season Pass allows entry into ALL Six Flags theme parks. Even though I had dreamed of visiting other parks around the country this summer, I just couldn't pull the trigger on…
193/365 Yesterday, I shared about using our Season Passes at Six Flags for Spring Break. Without the kids knowing, I planned a stop at Knott's Berry Farm that extended our trip another day. You can read Part 1 about our budget here, and Part 2 about the first half of our trip here. Thursday Keeping a Secret I have a hard time keeping surprises from the kids. I like to get them involved in the planning and hype them up for a trip rather than spring something on them. However, this time, I kept the Knott's Berry Farm portion of our trip a complete surprise. They knew I had gone on my conference trip and were insanely jealous. "We've NEVER been to Knott's Berry Farm! That's not fair!" I had…
192/365 For Spring Break this year, we decided to put our Six Flags season passes to good use and head to California and Magic Mountain. Yesterday I shared our budget and savings. In today's post, I'll go over our itinerary and share what we did each day through the first half of the trip. Then I'll finish it up in tomorrow's post. Monday Unpacking and Re-Packing I had gotten home late the night before from a conference, but had left a packing list for the kids to do while I was gone. Unfortunately, I hadn't planned for all of the things I would need to do to get ready for this trip, less than 24 hours after I returned from my last trip. Lesson learned! Driving at Night Needless to…
191/365 For Spring Break this year, we headed West to put our Six Flags annual passes to good use. In this part, I'll go over the budget, while the next part will include our itinerary and other fun stuff! If you click here, you can follow along on my trip budget spreadsheet as I go through each category. Entertainment I detest water parks, and even though we have one about a mile from our house, I have so far resisted the temptation to buy annual passes there. Well, resisted is much too strong a word. Avoided, vowed to never, changed the subject, pouted, and put my foot down. Luckily, my kids haven't pressed the issue, but this year, my girlfriend did. She told me last fall that if we bought…
153/365 In yesterday's post, we finished up our stay at Universal Orlando, but I had a small surprise for the kids: We're going to Disney! We stayed our last night at Pop Century to explore the Walt Disney Resort and have a character breakfast at BoardWalk Inn. You can read Part 1 about our budget and planning here, Day 1 here, Day 2 here, and Day 3 here. Pop Century Resort I was really impressed with the renovation that recently updated the rooms. It reminds me of the new Motel 6 rooms, but without the hit-or-miss quality of Motel 6. The second bed is also cleverly a table, and there are little nooks and crannies for storing things all over the room, especially near the bathroom. Another great feature is…
152/365 It's our last day in the parks. There's so much that we haven't done yet! You can read about our budget and deals in this post here, Day 1 here, Day 2 here, and Day 3 here. Packing Once More Since we were only at the Royal Pacific Resort for one night, we had to pack up and store our bags with bell services before taking the ferry to the park. I packed our bags strategically so that we could break from the theme parks midday to try the water park since our tickets include it, and today was the last day! Back to Universal Studios I don't even know what Islands of Adventures looks like from the front because we've never entered that way! Instead, it was back…
151/365 Our second day in the parks gets a little more interesting since we move over to the Royal Pacific Resort and pick up our Express Passes. You can read about our budget and deals in this post here, Day 1 here, and Day 2 here. Packing and Moving After having gotten myself to bed after 11:00pm the night before, I wasn't looking forward to getting up early to pack and move to the next hotel. Luckily, the kids weren't too keen on getting up early either, so I had plenty of time to pack everything up and ready to go after breakfast. We took a Lyft to Royal Pacific Resort, which is themed like a resort in Hawaii. It was really nice, and we were able to store the…
150/365 In yesterday's post, I wrote about the rocky start that our trip to Universal Orlando got off to. Today, we try to get back on track by going to the parks for the first time. You can also read about our budget and deals in this post. Late-ish Start In the morning, I figured that the kids would need to get some sleep after not going to bed until 2:00am, but then I realized that we would miss breakfast if they slept later than 9:30am. I woke them up with enough time to dress and go downstairs with the promise that they could go back to bed if they were still tired after breakfast. Hyatt House has a great free breakfast spread, and they were ready to go to…
149/365 I usually don't break my trip reports into more than two posts. Most times, Part 1 is all about the deal and the budget, and Part 2 is all about the itinerary. However, this trip is more complicated to write about than I anticipated, so I'm going to break the itinerary portion of my report into daily segments, starting with our outbound day, Saturday, February 2, 2019. You can read about our budget and deals in this post here. Cancelled Flight Our flight was supposed to leave PHX at around 10:30am, so we arrived at the airport at 8:30am, breezed through security with TSA PreCheck, and settled into the lounge. There was a message on my phone that our flight had been cancelled. You can read about that part…
