Luna Park

On the 5th day of our California vacation we drove from San Dimas to Santa Monica and checked into our hotel there. When we checked into our hotel, I was so excited to find out that our hotel had a Starbucks in it…SCORE! We spent the rest of the morning unpacking, walking to Whole Foods to buy some drinks and healthy snacks, and then napping. Later that evening we drove into LA to eat dinner at another restaurant that I had seen on the Food Network called “Luna Park”. Food Network mentioned that “Luna Park” had a wonderful “S’mores” dessert. Aidan had been nagging us for a couple weeks about making s’mores again at home, so we were excited to surprise him with this restaurant on our vacation. Luna Park was a nice casual restaurant that even had paper mats and crayons for the kids to color with, Yay! Honestly, I can’t remember what we ate for dinner there because all I can remember is how GOOD that “S’mores” dessert was! It was a lot of fun to assemble our s’mores using Luna Park’s house-made crisp graham crackers, toasted mini marshmallows, and dark chocolate sauce…YUMMM! In fact, we all enjoyed it so much that we ordered it twice! I’m seriously considering baking my own graham crackers and using dark chocolate sauce if we make s’mores at home again someday….

Legoland

Legoland was the first amusement park we went to on our 2011 California vacation. Aidan was so happy that Tito Alex was coming with us, and informed Mike and me on the car ride there that he was going to do some rides with his Tito Alex too. The Lego sculptures at Legoland are a lot of fun to take pictures with. Alex and I had enjoyed taking pictures with these sculptures while Caleb napped in his stroller later in the day, and Aidan waited in line with his dad and rode the rides.
What we quickly learned while standing in line for most of these rides (and we were there on a weekday) was that even though the lines might seem short, most of the rides move like they are really made of legos (slow), so for a couple of rides we found ourselves waiting in line for almost 35 min. On the plus side, these slow-moving rides made it much easier to take pictures of the kids riding them.

One of the unique snacks that we ended up trying at Legoland was the “Granny’s Apple Fries” with vanilla cream dipping sauce. “Interesting” and “different” would be the words that I would use to describe this snack, but I wouldn’t buy it again if we went back to Legoland. I’m sure this snack would be a winner for a lot of other people, but for us, even though it was a taste experience, it didn’t leave us amazed.

It is pretty difficult to make it through the entire Legoland park in one day with kids aged 5 and under, but that day we managed to go through about 75% of the park. If I had to give my overall opinion of Legoland I would say that it is worth going to, but not for more than a day. I’ve definitely seen better rides in other amusement parks (but young kids like ours honestly can’t tell the difference), but seeing the Lego sculptures is sure worth the park visit. We were only able to endure waiting through some of the slow lines in Legoland thanks to the fact that we live in such a multimedia age where our phones and iPads have games and videos that the kids can watch and play while waiting. Out of all the parks we visited throughout our vacation though, Legoland had the healthiest food choices (things like fresh made pasta to order, yogurt, fruit chips, frozen fruit bars, etc….) which made me very happy.