"I'll Do You One Better: Why is Gamora?" (WDW Vets Visit Cali, April/May 2019) Completed 6/23

Raeven

DIS Veteran
Joined
Sep 15, 2015
For those of you who haven't read one of our trip reports before
:welcome:

My name is Raeven! :wave2:

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I'm 26, and I'm the planner, photographer, and TR writer for our trips. I love Halloween/horror movies, music, good food, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and theme parks.

I also got to live out a lifelong dream this trip and pet/hold a fox which has been my favorite animal since I was 3 years old :lovestruc:


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This is my trip partner and boyfriend of 5.5 years, Josh:

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He’s 33 and likes being surprised with our trip itineraries, and only had one request for this trip which was to go to the Comedy Store in LA because he enjoys stand up comedy. He also likes delicious GF food, coffee, boxing, podcasts, Halloween/horror movies, and thrill rides.

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Background: This is my first time posting on the Disneyland boards here on the Dis, but I've written many trip reports here since 2015. We've been to WDW 8 times, Universal 9 times (including the last 4 HHNs), and even done a trip to Orlando/St Augustine that was less theme park based. But neither of us had ever been to California or Disneyland. So we planned a San Diego/Disneyland trip for April 26th-May 4th this year.

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We stayed 1 night at the Hyatt Place Denver, 2 nights at the Hotel Republic San Diego, and the remaining 5 nights at the Ayres Orange hotel in Anaheim. We had relatively good weather, although we were told by many people that it was cooler/rainier than it typically is that time of year. But coming from NY where it was still in the 40's most days :cold: we enjoyed the weather.

I've also started a DTR for this trip since last time many of you said you'd want to read my reviews outside WDW too:

WDW Foodies Take Disneyland -April/May 2019 (San Diego/DL DTR)

Stay tuned if you want to hear about:

  • The difference between the Seaworld parks we've been to (San Diego and Orlando)
  • Reviews of our 3 hotels
  • My first time seeing the ocean
  • Our fox encounter
  • The Superheroes Assemble even in DCA
  • Pop Up Disney
  • Our night in LA (including the I Like Scary Movies pop up)
  • How our numerous Lyft experiences went
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And you want to know the answer to these:

  • Why do we end up stuck in Denver?
  • What other animal did we get to learn about/pet this trip?
  • Is the San Diego Zoo really the best zoo?
  • Where can you go to hang out with foxes?
  • What's the best character breakfast at DL?
  • Would we stay at our DL area hotel again?
  • What's my favorite DL park?
  • Which pop up was our favorite?

The title of this trip report comes from a quote in Infinity War. The Guardians of the Galaxy movies are my favorite movies, and for the last 2 years I've been titling our May TR's with quotes from the movies, so I've decided to continue that trend this year since DCA has a lot of Guardians stuff (which I loved) & I got to meet Gamora this trip. Although I was really tempted to title this the super cliche "California here we comeeee" since I was a huge O.C. fan back in the day.

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Following. Very eager to hear about your trip. My daughter and I, also regular WDW visitors, just returned from our first trip to Disneyland as well, so it will be interesting to compare your perspectives to our experience.
 


Following along! Looking forward to hearing more details besides what we talked about already!

Yes! We did so many cool things!

Following. Very eager to hear about your trip. My daughter and I, also regular WDW visitors, just returned from our first trip to Disneyland as well, so it will be interesting to compare your perspectives to our experience.

Joining in, I enjoying reading your WDW TRs.

Will be trying to keep up better this time around!

Thanks for following along :wave2:
 


Following along. Looking to your thoughts on San Diego- DL etc. We love San Diego - so much to do . I still haven’t made it to DL. On my bucket list though.
 
Wouldn't miss this!!!

I also got to live out a lifelong dream this trip and pet/hold a fox which has been my favorite animal since I was 3 years old :lovestruc:
I am so happy you got to do this :goodvibes

Stay tuned if you want to hear about:
::yes::

Why do we end up stuck in Denver?
Yeah... I was wondering about that when I saw a hotel there listed... :scratchin

I have enough for 1-2 vlogs for almost every day of the trip.
Yay!!!

I also did a "week in the life"/week before vacation
Excited to see this, too!!! :thumbsup2
 
Following along! We were at the DLR about the same time as you, and I'm looking forward to seeing how similar/different our experiences were!
 
Joining in!! :goodvibes

Thanks for following! :wave:

Following along. Looking to your thoughts on San Diego- DL etc. We love San Diego - so much to do . I still haven’t made it to DL. On my bucket list though.

Thanks for following along, there is so much to do in San Diego! I definitely think we're going to have to go back again sometime.

Joining in here too!

Following along! :wave:

Following along to hear about your epic adventures!

Thanks for following! :wave2:

I am so happy you got to do this :goodvibes

It was really awesome! I'm really glad we kept it in our plans. Thanks for encouraging me to keep it in there when I wasn't sure :hug:

Yeah... I was wondering about that when I saw a hotel there listed... :scratchin

You'll get to find out very soon! Although it's not a fun reason :laughing:


Excited to see this, too!!! :thumbsup2

Thank you for being so excited :rotfl: I hope you enjoy my very sunburned nose in the trip vlogs :laughing:

Following along! We were at the DLR about the same time as you, and I'm looking forward to seeing how similar/different our experiences were!

Thanks for following along :wave: Oh that's right you were there almost the same days! I read some of your PTR over on the DL boards! Crowds were a little bigger than I expected, but overall I think we got everything in that we wanted to so it wasn't too bad just a little surprising.
 
I'm really glad we kept it in our plans. Thanks for encouraging me to keep it in there when I wasn't sure :hug:
Happy I could help ;) Knowing how much you love foxes, I just couldn't imagine you not doing this :goodvibes

You'll get to find out very soon! Although it's not a fun reason :laughing:
I was afraid of that... :faint:

Thank you for being so excited :rotfl: I hope you enjoy my very sunburned nose in the trip vlogs :laughing:
:laughing:
 
California Here We Come
April 26th

As you may or may not know I feel like our trips start the minute work ends. This trip however would be getting off to a slightly later start than usual since our flight was around 11 am, so we had booked tickets to see Endgame about an hour after I got our of work on the 25th. I won't spoil anything here; but as you might remember from my PTR I was a tad disappointed with the movie. I thought it was good, but felt that it wasn't among the best Marvel movies I've seen.
So onto the morning of our travel day! We woke up early for our 11:25 am flight. For some reason I decided to check the app to make sure our flight was still on time and there it was a message saying we could change our flight for free due to weather...

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I had no idea what kind of weather. In fact our spring trips are my time to take a break from worrying about the weather. (Since we usually also travel to Florida during hurricane season in the fall for HHN). It turns out there were massive storms that day and some tornados.

The weather would be especially bad in Baltimore (where our flight connected through). We thought the smartest thing to do would be to rebook for the only available flight to San Diego that day that didn't connect through BWI. It was a slightly later flight connecting through Denver so we booked that. We'd miss dinner but that would be all, so I called our hotel to let them know we'd be later and tried to get some more sleep. Our new flight left at 6:25pm and when I got up I checked Flightaware, only to find that...the flight coming to take us to Denver was coming from BWI.


So we ended up eating, getting ready, etc. I think we ended up leaving around 4 pm for the airport. Here's our leaving pic:


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By the time we left I could already see that the flight at BWI had been considerably delayed (flights there ended up being grounded for about 3 hours). At the Southwest desk the manager told us we should wait and see because they can't make a call until the plane is in the air (he was hoping they'd hold the connecting flight because there were 8 people going to San Diego), but that it did look we'd miss the layover and the best bet would be to take the first flight out of Denver in the morning and sleep in the airport.
He didn't want us to rebook until we knew for sure that they couldn't hold the plane though. (Also there were no flights going to San Diego from our airport for 2 more days so we couldn't just go home). We went through security, and waited to see when they would make an announcement.

Josh and I talked about what we should do, and decided there's no way we'd get any sleep in the airport so I looked for a reasonably priced hotel near the Denver airport and we decided we'd take the second direct flight of the day around 9 am so we wouldn't have to get up too early. The direct flight was about 2 hours so we'd still arrive with enough time to get to Seaworld and eat before our tour.

Finally at about 6pm they made the announcement that anyone connecting through Denver would miss their layover and to come up and rebook. Guess who was the first person in line? :rotfl:



I told them what we wanted to do and we had no issue changing flights. I can't remember when our new flight was but I think it was like 9pm? I was grateful for the manager at the Southwest counter, I didn't think his suggestion to sleep in the airport was a good one, but overall we didn't have any hassle rebooking so he was helpful in that regard.

So far we've had good experiences with Southwest (this being our first major problem).
After I changed the flight, I was able to book the Hyatt Place Denver Airport, and I called our hotel in San Diego to let them know we'd miss that night. They said they'd still have to charge us which I figured, but surprisingly when we checked out it wasn't on the bill! :banana:

After it was all settled I felt much better.
Since everything had calmed down and all we could do now was wait to for the flight.
We had our own row on the plane which was great. I've been rewatching some old VH1 reality shows so I watched 2 episodes of I Love Money :rotfl: (I actually didn't watch the last season when it was on TV so I decided to watch it then for some reason). I also listened to some music, and watched Crybaby. I love that movie, but I hadn't watched it in years, and it was even better than I remembered.
Soon we were in Denver. The airport was HUGE, but despite that we got our luggage really fast.
Our hotel room was actually really nice, it was probably my favorite one we stayed at.

Here's the sitting area:


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Bedroom:

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Bathroom:

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(Why is there a weird window into the shower? :rotfl:)


I think we booked a room with a view, but the view is kind of out in the distance. We couldn't see anything at night, but here's the view during the day:


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We got to bed around midnight maybe? And got up around 5:45 am to get ready for our flight.

Ready to go:


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At check out I got to pet a St Bernard which I was very excited about because I think they're adorable, but my parents would never let me get one as a kid because they're giant :rotfl: (The people in front of us at the check out had a very friendly one).

We took a Lyft back to the airport and on the way got to see the Blue Mustang statue:


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For those of you who don't know the story:

The official name of this statue is Blue Mustang, but people call it Blucifer. The artist who created this giant statue was actually killed by a piece of it while building it and many thought it was cursed. Other people just wanted it removed because it's ugly. It has red eyes that glow at night and is a bright cobalt color (if you can't tell from the picture). The airport has also been the center of many conspiracy theories over the years, which it seems like they have embraced as a marketing tool from the posters we saw there. I had actually heard about the statue from an article I read once, and Josh had read something about it too and was pretty interested in seeing the statue. I wish we could've seen how creepy it was at night, but it was really dark and rainy so we only got to see it during the day.

We then had to take a faux monorail to our terminal, but this one was way scarier than the Orlando one. For one thing it was mostly in tunnels, but it also went a lot faster and I was certain I'd fall over :rotfl:



Despite the size of the airport the security was super quick, and our flight boarded on time. We were some of the last people on due to the last minute change, but luckily some guy sitting alone towards the back (who actually wanted the aisle seat) asked us if we wanted to sit with him. He was very innovative, he threaded a strip of paper though his phone case and hung it from the tray hook on the back of the chair and made himself a little TV on the back of his seat :rotfl: (which for some reason I thought was so important to tell you all that I typed it in my notes).

I don't usually spend too much time looking out the window on flights until we get closer to landing, but wow seeing the mountains from the plane was pretty cool:

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I also watched an episode of Channel Zero: Butcher's Block (which I finished when I got home and it's ended up being my favorite season of the show), and we were there in less than 2 hours.
The San Diego airport wasn't very big, and again it was quick to gather our luggage and go. We took a Lyft to our hotel which was only a short distance away.

We had arrived at the Hotel Republic. It’s one of those "boutique hotels" that's owned by a bigger brand (Marriott), but was redesigned to look more unique. This area was both the lobby and their restaurant though we never ate there.

Here's our room:


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Next up
Finally the fun stuff starts!

:jumping1:

We head to Seaworld for the Seven Seas Food Festival and to meet some seals and sea lions.

 
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