Postcards  from California    (This page belongs to Detectives Hayden and Nathan, on a mission to check out some of the hot spots for kids in L.A.)

July 12th..... Dear Diary,
                        We arrive at Uncle Gary and Aunt Inge's house in Irvine, California at the southern end of Los Angeles. It's hot outside but the house is so cool.....so is the cat, her name is "Blackie" and she looks just like a witch's cat, all sleek and...well, black. Here kitty-kitty...now why is she hiding under the bed?....We case  the joint and it appears there are three playgrounds within easy walking distance for parents (we can con them into carrying us home if necessary)....Dad and Uncle Gary take first shift at the Park while Mum did whatever she does when we're not around...probably sleep!!
Uncle Gary has bought the "Walking With Dinosaurs" video series and we have to sit and watch it with the "oldies" so they don't get too scared in all the gory bits.

July 13th....Dear Diary,
                        We fool around until Mum and Dad get organised...what takes parents so long? A bucket and spade are the only necessary equipment for the beach!! Finally, after hours and hours of waiting we hit the sand....Laguna beach....Dad says its California's second silicone valley...go figure!! The sand is hot and the surf is like ice...cold plus hot equals warm...yeah. We give the unanimous vote of five stars for ideal-sand-castle-making texture. As usual we only just get here and the oldies want to head home...and we were just getting real friendly with the little blonde in the two-piece!! What's the hurry? Funny how Mum always has a few extra minutes for the shops on the way to the car...boring...except for the cool art galleries...neon water sculptures are awesome. Uncle Gary and Dad take us to the rec. pool down the road...we had a go on the diving board...glad Mum stayed home......When Aunt Inge gets home from work they take us to dinner at Dave & Busters. Yum...pizza!! Then we walk through the door to the games room and we are in seventh heaven...all the coolest video/virtual games for big and little kids...Uncle Gary kept zippin' his card through all night...it was really hard to stop having fun...I mean really, really HARD!! (*Special Diary Note:Be extra good so we get a revisit)

July 14th....Dear Diary,
                        Back to Laguna Beach for some ray-soaking and wave-dodging...Mum has the good sense to pack us a lunch today....fool around in the p.m.After dinner we go round to the big park by the lake. Climb the water-tower slide many times until I (Hayden)  tripped and banged my head on the edge...youch...head came up in a boulder-sized bump.....there's a lesson there somewhere......
Have a headache all night...oldies play Scrabble...again.....

July 15th....Dear Diary,
                        We jump on the freeway and speed down to the Wild Animal Park near San Diego...well,we wanted Dad to speed like everyone else was, but what can you do?
Its a warm day, lots of people....we grab some maps and see the tracks are like a kagillion miles long....Mum and Dad have that gleam in their eye that says "we don't carry"...oh well, off to the stroller hire place....gotta love 'em!!
Yahoo!..We're on Safari!....We saw rats and cats and elephants and sure as you're born the only thing we didn't see was a unicorn...and maybe a koala....But they did have heaps of Lorikeets....it looked just like our backyard at home...noisy critters.....We give a thumbs up for the Safari Train, the cool Bird-Show, the drippy ice-cream, the baby rhinos and the huge Californian Condors.....walking around the paths it felt like we were in the zoo and the animals were outside in the wild. It would take all day to tell you everything so why not look for yourself (there's some neat stuff for kids to do at this site, have fun!! : Wild Animal park>)
 

Somehow we lost track of when we went to bed that night.....(Yawn...thanks for the great day Aunt Inge.......zzzzzzzzz)

July 16th.....Dear Diary,
                        Its Sunday, where's everyone gone...No Aunt Inge, No Uncle Gary, No Dad....Oh yeah...here they come   .Party-Time.!! Kids!!
We play with Erica and Gregory and have great hamburgers for lunch. The oldies tell wild stories to entertain each other. Renate and Heinz have brought us a cool water octopus spray for the hose...I wonder if it has some other uses...hmmmm....
Dennis and Suzanne said we can come down to San Diego and play with Gregory soon.

July 17th....Dear Diary,
                        Today's the day...the big one......the one they've been threatening not to do unless we behave..all the time...forever.....oh man,what kid can ever live up to that sort of idealism...can we compromise?
                        Disneyland...fantasyland, adventureland, frontierland...why do we get the feeling that Mum and Dad are more excited about this than we are? Hooray, just off the press...Aunt Inge hears on the T.V. that its Disneyland's 45th Birthday...what better day could we have picked!!(Then again, are the lines always this long or did we just happen to randomly choose the busiest day, along with a bazillion other Mickey fans?)

Press here for fastforward >>....

FirstwewentontheTarzanTreehouse,Sawanelephantsquirtwaterthroughitstrunk
WentontheJungleRide,SawanIndian,WentonthePirateRidewithgreatsinginpiratesand
treasure,gotalittlescaredwhenwewentdownthewaterfall,Wentonthe
MerrygoroundwithMumandDad,SawaMagicshow
WentontheSmallWorldCruiseandcan'tgetthesongoutofmyhead
DroveMumaroundthebendintheAutopiaRide,SawsomecoolstuffintheInnovationsstudio
WentonTomSawyersIslandbyraftandgotlostintheCavescooool,ClimbedarealFortand
shotsomeleavesoutofatree,WenttotheBearShowandsawthedancingsingingbears,Wentina
JumpinghouseinTinytoonland,WentonaTrainandUncleGaryjumpedofftomeetour
cousinDeborahinthecrowd,WesawMickeyintheParadebysittingonMumandDadsshoulders
HaydensawtheFireworksI(Nathan)fellasleeprightatthewrongtimeandmissed
Tinkerbelldoherthing,Wesaidgoodbyeatelevenoclock.

Whew...did you catch all that? Here have a look for yourself >

July 18th...Dear Diary,
                   Wagons Ho...we're packed up and headed south for a few days....Blackie needs to recouperate says Mum, whatever that means...
We stop at a really old place with really old furniture and half of its fallen down about a hundred years ago in an earthquake...it has some really great goldfish, bigger than a football swimming in a fountain...we have to be quiet....this is not a cool place for kids, repeat Warning:There are no rides here, no swings or slides....MaydayMayday..bail out before its too late.
Mum says its called San Juan Capistrano and its a very famous old mission and the swallows used to nest here from March to October every year...flying in the hundreds to arrive on the same day every year....so....where are they?...out to lunch I guess..noone's home....maybe its because of all that hammering their doing over there to fix up the broken bits......
One minute we're in Capis..Capo...whatever...next we've time-warped to La Jolla(Say "La Hoya"...its Spanish, no really, it is).How does this happen? Wake up Nath,we're here!
We meet Lisa at her house and say "Hi" to Kirra the dog and Kasha the cat and have the sinking feeling that Kirra wants to eat us, or round us up, or something...Lisa kisses him on the nose and he likes it....Mum says he looks like a beautiful wolf, we say we'll sit real still and promise not to annoy the cat..if that's alright with you Kirra?
To the beach, to the beach, to the beach beach beach........Hey, the water's warm down here! Hi Rick, come in for a dip, the water's loooverly!!
Homecooked burgers and Hotdogs...is this boy heaven, or what!!
We get our own beds with a lighthouse lamp...shut the door please Mum...we wouldn't want Kirra...you know...accidently coming into the room in the middle of the night looking for snacks or anything......

July 19th...Dear Diary
                    Lisa we love you....pancakes, bacon, fresh bananas and blackberries and syrup...yumyumyumyum.....
Dad borrows Rick's board and vows to surf "no matter what"...he rents us some boards too...Mum drowns us in sunscreen a megasquillion times but we still got browner....six hours at the beach will do that to you!
Pizza for dinner...We vote to live here....just kidding, Kirra.....

July 20th....Dear Diary,
                    "On the road again"....bye Lisa, bye Rick...thanks for sharing your great beach, your lovely house and your yummy food.....see you in Bali one day!!
Dad drives down to Seal rocks and we watch the sea lions playing in the waves...they're super-fast swimmers and great fishermen-er-seals. We watch the remote control planes and parasailers off the coast, then head home. We stop at a shop..oh no!!..Dad buys us some new shoes and some Lego....oh yes!!!
We get back to Uncle Gary's and Aunt Inge's just in time to hussle off to the L.A. Stadium to watch our very first live baseball game between the Angels and the Texas Rangers. We had hotdogs (gherkin relish counts as a vegetable doesn't it?)... Aunt Inge buys us Angel bears and T-Shirts(Thanks Aunt Inge) and we yelled a lot and that helped our team win. A home-run meant they had fireworks and turned on the giant fountain...wow!!
We got home way after dark and fooled around until midnight.

July 21st...Dear Diary,
                    Mum and Dad are taking us to see the Dinosaur flick at the Woodbridge Cinema...we all ate too much pop-corn but the movie was five kids stars*****
Aunt Inge's son Roger and his girl-friend Marilyn come over for dinner. We go to the park while Inge makes dinner, then we draw pictures for Marilyn...its so easy to win the girls over....a little sweet talk and they're like putty in your hands.....

July 22nd...Dear Diary,
                    Not shopping again? MaydayMaydayKidalert Kidalert...wait...what's this Rainforest Cafe....thunderstorms and "live" gorillas and pythons, waterfalls and trumpeting elephants surrounded by jungle...all this and pizza too.....man, you have to check this out>
 After dinner we went out to the "Spectrum"...you guessed it...shops again....and restaurants and movies....and magic shops....and slime-making stuff...and night clubs....and galleries....and chocolate covered strawberries the size of apples washed down with an iced mocha.....and a cool science shop with model dinosaurs......and a medieval shop with King Henry VIII selling real Arthurian swords......

July 23rd....Dear Diary,
                Waffles and icecream for breakfast......drive to Westminster to see friends of Dads..Geoff and Jody....they have four kids of their own:Bryce Briton Travis and Taylor and half a dozen they adopted from the neighbourhood...you see, they have a pool! We figured two more bods weren't going to be noticed and joined the party.
We drove around for awhile, checked out the house that Dad lived in when he was a kid (too many years to count)
We played with Fabian from next-door until dinner-time

July 24th.....Dear Diary,
                We don't want to hurt "Bluey's" feelings but we rented a car for the day so we could have air-con...ssshhhh!!
We drove to the foothills of L.A. mountains up near Hollywood to La Canada to meet Maryanne and Michael and their kids...Kimberly,Andrew and Kevin. We thought our "Twinkle, Twinkle" was pretty good until we heard Kevin on the piano...we were impressed!! We cooled off in the pool while Dad caught some zzz's on the pool lounge.
Kevin showed us his cool video games and all his Star Wars stuff...our eyes were poppin'!! Dad got to hold Michael's Oscar,lucky he didn't drop and break it...I don't think you can buy them at the shops.
Kimberly had to stay and do homework..yuck!!!...but Kevin and Maryanne drove us over to Universal Studios...we went on the tour and tried to be brave but some of those special effects are just tooo real....if you really want a buzz check out the E.T. ride..we did...twice!! We also saw the Rugrats Live Show...the Animal show which was very funny..Mum went with Maryanne and Kevin on the Jurassic Park ride and got soaking wet...there were no lines so they went on it again...Mum said it was "brilliant" but she looks really scared in the photo!! It was after 10 o'clock by the time we got back to their house.....and somewhere round there I think we may have shut our eyes for a rest..........Bye Maryanne, Michael, Kimberly, Kevin, Andrew and Tori!!! Thanks for a great day!!

July 25th...Dear Diary,
                Mum says we've had enough excitement to last us for years so we're doing quiet things like "The Park"......swings, slides, yeah, I think we can handle that....
When Aunt Inge gets home from work we drive over to Dave & Busters for one more play at the games.....we cash in our winning chips for toys!!! I (Hayden) get a leather softball and I (Nathan) get a Daffy Duck...with Blackie not around, Daffy can get all that extra attention in the car on the way home!!

Goodbye Uncle Gary and Aunt Inge...thanks for the lovely holiday, we had so much fun that L.A. gets a kids rating of infinity stars....and that's even bigger than you are Uncle Gary!!
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