Huntington Beach

Matt earned a trip to Huntington Beach through work, because he is seriously the best employee they have.  I am so proud of him for all of his hard work.  He seems to balance it all so well- demanding work as a collections supervisor, a student at the U, and a dad of 2.  Comcast treats him well, and we are always getting gift cards or dinners out for all of his hard work and success.  This trip was obviously the best award yet...  It was so fun to spend some time together, just the two of us. 

We left on a Monday afternoon, checked into a very nice hotel that Matt's dad helped us get, and headed to Downtown Disney.  I have never been to Downtown Disney... I guess the two times I've been to Disneyland we've gone in the other way, so it was pretty exciting and fun for me.  It really made me want to take our kids there, and made me miss them, because I knew they'd love it so much!  We walked around, window shopped, bought a couple souvenirs for the kids, and ate at the Rainforest Cafe.

I think my favorite part of Downtown Disney was the lego store.  It is amazing what they can build out of legos!

Then I took some (dark) pictures of Disneyland and California Adventure...  I was kind of giddy to be so close to Disneyland!  For some reason it was a little surreal for me.

And I took some pictures of the hotel.  It was very modern and cool!

On Tuesday, we checked into the hotel that Comcast provided for us.  It was very luxurious and so fun to be in such a fancy place...

The view from our room... just dreamy.  It was fun to hear the water running, and we slept with the door open to hear it.

We enjoyed walking down to the pier often while we were there.  The walk to the pier was a mile, so we got some good exercise in on our walks.  We saw this pelican a few times...

And one of our favorite things was to eat at Ruby's Diner at the end of the pier.  It was so cool to eat pretty much out in the ocean, and their shakes were so yummy!  It's a good thing we walked so much to make up for all the food we ate.  We were spoiled by some nice breakfasts and dinners from Comcast as well.

Seriously... the hotel was amazing!

On Wednesday we went on a VIP tour experience at Universal Studios.  I wasn't able to ride on any rides... which was pretty much fine by me because I'm not a huge ride person anyway.  While I was waiting for the group to get off the Jurassic Park ride, I spotted Dora and grabbed some pictures for the kids...

After the rides portion of the day, we toured the filming studios.  This is the set of Parenthood, which we walked around.  It was pretty cool to see everything and learn how they film things.

We drove by them filming NCIS... this episode was taking place in Germany... there were German flags hanging in the streets....

One of the coolest sets we saw was the set from War of the Worlds.

 

On Thursday, we got to do whatever we wanted, and all I wanted to do was sit by the pool and relax.  Hanging out at the pool is probably my favorite thing in the world, and the atmosphere here was perfect... there's nothing better than a pool and palm trees.  We got lucky, because the weather had been pretty chilly the whole week- jackets needed, but not chilly compared to Utah- but Thursday the sun came out and it was so nice.  It wasn't hot, but just warm enough to be at the pool.  Sadly, I got very, very sunburned.  Probably my second worst sunburn ever, and nothing will compare to my sunburn incident in high school.  It was literally a couple weeks before I felt like my skin had healed from this sunburn.  I was pretty miserable for a good week and quite literally sick to my stomach the first day of sunburn, but luckily it was the last day of our vacation so I didn't miss out on things in California.  I got home and spent days in bed trying to recover...

Despite the sunburn, the trip was just amazing.  Matt and I had such a good time.  It will definitely be something we'll always remember!