A Very Disney New Year! - Jan 6

Hey, we have a great idea! DISNEYLAND! The last couple years we have made the trek down to Disneyland on or around Chloe's birthday so this year we were happy when they slid back the winter break schedule to include the first week of January. As it turns out, so were about 200,000 other people because the parks were absolutely jam packed. We have made a point over the last several years to visit the park in "off peak" times but apparently the off peak times are slowly starting not to exist. As they have steadily increased ticket prices and annual pass prices the idea was to decrease the number of visitors at any given time which seems counter intuitive but it has not worked. I have a feeling that as they have raised prices, it had the opposite effect which is that MORE people ended up buying the annual passes and then those people have justified the purchase price by visiting the park MORE often. I know we basically fell into that trap. We can go? Let's go! I have a feeling as time goes on, they will keep reducing the amount of days available for all but the most expensive passes, especially with the new Star Wars land opening(this year).

In just 2 days, Chloe will be turning *lucky number* Seven! I for one absolutely cannot believe how quickly it has flown by. I'm sure I have said that every year. We spend 2 full days in Disneyland and lucky for us we are pretty familiar with how to maximize our ride to wait time using well times "fast passes" otherwise we might not have been able to do anything considering the attendance. We have not been in the park when they have reached capacity(where they don't let more people in) but it really felt like they must have been pretty close. We had 2 days of nice weather and on the way out we drove through a lot of rain so we certainly lucked out at least with that. In a weird string of luck(I say it's because of Chloe's upcoming birthday) we literally rode in the front row of every roller coaster we got on. California Screamin, Big Thunder Mountain, Space Mountain. All of those Chloe rode in the first seat, first row. Fun!

Just sharing a random mix of photos taken, some with my camera and some with my phone. I wanted to experiment and just use my phone for 100% of the pictures I would take but in the end, I still don't think it's worth it for me. I like using my actual camera. =)

Have a great weekend~

-Brian