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Friday 19 September 2014

Day 12, the end of Disney (for now), on to Phase Three

8:00 AM - Up and while Tracey begins The Process, I finish packing and head down to La Brea Bakery to grab us some breakfast. I get a couple of bacon and egg paninis. HOLY CRAP they were fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. Highly recommend these. Will be sure to go back next week and get more.

11:00 AM - Checked out of the hotel which is always heartbreaking, but a little bit less so than normal this time as it's less than a week until we are back for one night. Not this exact hotel, but the Disneyland Hotel just down the "street", and by "street" of course I mean at the other end of Downtown Disney.

Off to Disneyland where we ride the last few rides we had missed, and a couple for the second time, before deciding it's time to hit the road. We decide to take the Monorail out of the park, and boy did that ever turn out to be a fabulous decision, as we got to sit in the nose of the Monorail! That was the first time we had ever done that (it's not something they always do, we just got lucky...right place, right time) and the view is totally different than what you get anywhere else in the Monorail. Quite a lovely way to end this chapter of our vacation.

We get our car, squeeze the luggage in (and we've hardly bought ANY Disney stuff yet.... getting it all into the car on our way home next week is going to be interesting) and hit the road.

3:30 PM - We arrive at the Lawrence Welk Resort in Escondido, our home for the next 6 nights. We've stayed here before, and it's always lovely. After a short wait to check in, we are given our room and head over to the "concierge" to get our parking pass and to book our 90 minute timeshare presentation...or so they hoped. I turn them down, which never goes over that well, but c'est la vie. I am honest and tell them that $100 is just not enough to justifying spending 90 minutes of my wife and my time on a timeshare pitch that we have no interest in. We already own a timeshare (obviously, as they knew we exchanged our timeshare week through RCI) and there is no chance in Hell we are buying another one, so why bother? They push a bit but I shut them down and we head up to our room.

Things don't start very well, as the first thing we notice is that there is no in-suite laundry!! WTF??? I would never never never never never never ever ever ever ever book a place with no in-suite laundry, especially for the third week of a 3-week driving tour! I mean, we packed exactly enough clothes for two weeks, with the expectation to wash our clothes for the third week...and we have to hump our clothes across the street to launder them? Uh-uh. No fucking way.

Back down to the desk to talk to the Manager and complain. He is very sympathetic, but can do nothing for us now, as the resort is booked for the entire weekend. It's crazy busy so I'm not totally surprised by that. He has promised to try to upgrade us to a bigger room with laundry as early as Monday if it's possible. We'll see.

If that wasn't enough, the room also doesn't have a bathtub.... and my babydoll loves her baths! I couldn't really care less, it has a gorgeous huge shower which is fine with me, but Tracey is less than impressed. Hopefully that will rectify itself early in the week.

Other than those two (rather important) issues, the room and resort are lovely. Our patio overlooks a golf course. Actually, it's ON a golf course.

Down to Target to pick up supplies for the week (I get ID'd buying wine.... good Lord. I've been old enough to buy wine in the USA for longer than this clerk has been alive) and then back to the resort where we grab some Pizza Hut for dinner before the chore of laundry begins. There is a pool (one of the five at this resort) right next to the laundry so we head there while we wait for the laundry to finish. It's a lovely pool area, which features two pools, a hot tub, water slide, kiddy water area, and fire pit. I suspect this pool may see a fair amount of my wife over the next few days.

We had originally left ourselves open to the idea of going back to Disneyland on Monday to finish up anything left undone, but we got just about everything done so we don't need to do that. We will just spend another day chilling at the pool, and maybe we'll go up to Temecula to check out some local wineries.

I guess you could say instead of Screamin' and Soarin', we'll be Drinkin' and Snorin'.

9:00 PM - Finally finished all the laundry, it's washed, folded and put away. Finally feels like we are here and relaxing. Time to open up a bottle of Pinot Grigio bought at Target and relax for the evening. Tomorrow we are off to the San Diego Safari Park! Always fun.

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