we discovered that we had budgeted too much money for our stay in the hotel
- having taken the price in dollars as the cost in pounds – and this allowed us
to stay a couple of extra nights in LA. We both knew it would be hard to return
to campsites after sleeping in a proper bed for so long - especially because
we had already had the extra nights of luxury in the Grand Canyon - but quite
honestly we did not care.
We ended up with six whole days in Los Angeles. For five of these we had a
pass to go into Disneyland, ample time to see everything and do all the rides -
or so we thought.
Our estimation of the amount of time needed for the theme park was
based on a visit to Disneyworld in Florida a year earlier. Mickey's holiday
home down there in the sunshine state consists of four separate amusement
parks, plus a couple of water parks, and each of the main parks had taken us
two days to see. Disneyland is much smaller - due to the cost of land in LA -
and only has two parks, the Magic Kingdom and California Adventures. With
the time available to us we could spend two days in each park and kick back a
bit on the fifth day of our tickets. However, the best laid plans of (Mickey) mice
and men as they say, with one flaw - other people.
During our time in Disneyland the parks were packed, especially on
Christmas Day, Boxing Day and the subsequent weekend. Perhaps this
should have been obvious to us, given that Christmas is the biggest holiday of
the year, but we based our expectations on our own normal yuletide activities
- staying at home with family. We thought the parks would be like ghost
towns, though we did realize that the alternative - huge crowds - was a