Travels of the Bay family and the Yoda Van

The Most Expensive Happiest Place on Earth

After 50 weeks and 21000 miles on the road we returned to the in-laws last Saturday July 21^st at 5 minutes before midnight. 2 weeks sooner than expected.

First however I need to talk about the leading up to our return. 

A couple of months ago Allison’s parents told us that they wanted to invite us to Disneyland. All we had to do was pick a day. We chose Julian’s birthday and used the time to get the kids excited abut it, since they didn’t know what Disneyland was.  It turns out that Dan (Allison’s dad) and I weren’t all that excited, because we were both very skeptical how much we would enjoy it. I was mainly worried about the culture shock for us, not being able to drink and drive, have to buckle up (even the kids), not being allowed to ride in the back of pickup trucks, but also a lot of stupid rules and regulations out of fear of lawsuits. For example, Julian wasn’t allowed to go one of the safest slides I have seen in the last 11 month, because he wasn’t able to swim from 1 end of the pool to the other. With a waiting parent and at least 3 lifeguards this slide wouldn’t propose any hazard, especially since he has been on slides 3 times the height and speed. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against rules. After all I am German and I think we are the inventers of rules and regulations, but there is also a thing called common sense and another thing called law suites. So yes, I was a little disturbed at first, mainly because I had to keep telling the boys: “Oh no, we are back in America, you can’t do that here!” I must say however that the people enforcing all of those rules did it in a very friendly way. 

I was also a bit worried about Disneyland, because I didn’t want to spend 3 days there going on children’s rides and I was not sure if either one of the in-laws would go on the cool rides with me. Luckily it turned out that Dan seemed to enjoy them as much as I did and everyone had a great time. We had such a great time that we didn’t even have any family blow-outs like we did when we met in Costa Rica.

Maybe it was unnecessary to be worried about having a good time there, because after all, it’s “The happiest place on earth!” I was reminded of that when I watched a young mother screaming at her little girl: “Stop being crabby now. This is the happiest place on earth!”  And you must be happy if you are willing to spend 32 dollars on a pizza.  Or 10 dollars on a Big Mac, fries and a coke.  I don’t have any other explanation for those prices. 

Other rules that struck me as odd at Disneyland were: while it’s not allowed for pregnant woman to go on a 4 foot long waterslide, people go out of their way to make every ride as handicapped accessible as possible. And that’s actually a great thing, but that also means hoisting 600+ pound people on and off their electric scooters into a ride that catapults you several hundred feet in the air and freefall down to the ground. I guess it must be safer or a smaller risk of being sued to let the fattest of the fat go on multi g rides than the expected mother on a baby waterslide.

I also couldn’t help but notice that Allison isn’t quite right with her statement that Germans are some of the worst dressed peoples in the western world. While I don’t think she is wrong with this statement and I am certainly not the kind of person who dresses in a way to improve the image of the Germans, I must say, Americans are right up there with the Germans, when it comes to being dressed badly. I have no eye for fashion or style, but anyone who does must get headaches when watching people in Disneyland. 

Despite all that everyone had a great time and after 3 days there and a birthday breakfast for Julian with Goofy were also ready to head on.

The plan was to spend about another 10 days on the road to get from LA to Seattle. There were still a lot of things we wanted to see and 7 or 8 people we wanted to visit. We spent the first night in a State Park at the Pacific near Santa Barbara. We didn’t really like it too much there and decided to speed up the rest of the trip, because we had less and less motivation of packing in and out. So the next day we drove the “Big Sur highway” passing 2 towns we originally wanted to stop in. We made it to Stockton, spent the night in a motel and left early the next morning to hopefully make it to Medford, Oregon or maybe even a bit further.  When the place we wanted to stay was full, we were not in the mood for searching another place and decided to just keep driving. On this day we drove 800 miles. That’s by far the longest time we have spent on the road and almost 3% of our entire trip. Everything went pretty smooth, and we were even greeted by rain and gray skies right after entering into Washington. But with the rain came some car problems. Not only did the heater not work (we didn’t need it in Mexico), but it engine also started acting strange. The car started stuttering and for a while it seemed that we might not make it back that day and have the first serious breakdown after over 21000 miles and less than 100 miles from home. Luckily the stuttering stopped and we made it back at 5 minutes before midnight where the in-laws were very happily awaiting us. It was a great relief for them to see us (especially the grandkids) back home. The kids are also having a great time, because they get so much attention now and are reunited with all of their old toys that they didn’t get to play with for almost 1 year.

As for Allison and me, I guess we are sort of happy to be back. We are done with traveling for a while. It’s great to see the in-laws being reunited with the boys and we are looking forward to moving back to our house in Seattle in the middle of August, but it will be hard to get used to a life without the sun. So far I have only seen it once since we are back and we have only been cold. 

Even though we are back in the states, this is not the end of our blog, because we still have a lot of thoughts and stories that we want share and as long as the yodavan is up and running, we will have stories to share.

As probably all of our readers already know this weekend the greatest soccer team of all time (VfB Stuttgart) won the German Bundesliga for the first time in 15 years. It was totally unexpected and therefore it is even sweeter now.

During our travels this year Stuttgart was televised several times and every time we got to see them play they won and captured first place. After a few ups and downs this season we watched them again last weekend and they were again in first place on the last day of the season. The last and most important game was also televised in Mexico and we couldn’t wait to watch the game, but then a catastrophe happened. Our landlord didn’t pay the cable bill and cable was turned off for the most important soccer game of the last 15 years. You can imagine how frustrated I was.

In a previous post we mentioned a friend of ours who we referred to as Dave the Prick.  That actually wasn’t our own name for him.  He’s well known in Seattle under that name.  But we take it all back.  Most people who know Dave probably wouldn’t even dare to ask if they could come over to his house at 8:15 in the morning to watch a soccer game that he didn’t really care about.  No one really would expect any answer from him other than “F—, no!”  But luckily we got his life-partner Terri on the phone the night before and she agreed that Dave would be up and would let us in. 

Thanks Dave and Terri and thanks to the greatest soccer team on earth, who has the chance to also win the German Trophy next weekend.  So if you missed them becoming German Champion don’t forget to watch them win the trophy next weekend.