Continuing yesterday's post...
So we're kinda stuck, no ID for me, no working credit cards, but we have enough cash to enjoy Friday at Disneyland. We had purchased one-day park hopper passes online. I would've just bought main park passes, but they don't sell those online, and we didn't want to stand in line for tickets. Plus, there were a few things I wouldn't mind seeing at California Adventure... Fine, an extra $40 for two tickets. We figured we'd save a few bucks on parking by taking our hotel's free shuttle. On the shuttle ride, I got ahold of a real First Tech agent, who got us all fixed up (reactivated the dead card and informed me that all their debit cards have different numbers, even on the same account, thus Jenny's still works- woohoo!) Get off the hotel shuttle, and ah crap, we forgot the printed passes back in the room. We didn't realize it 'til the bus had left, not to return for 3 hours. Crap. Disney has a sophisticated online system with a unique ID on the pass (that's live-linked at the gate to prevent multiple usages)- guest services should be able to look us up and reprint one, right? Wrong. "Sorry sir, that's your ticket- we have no way to replace them". That's exceedingly lame, considering the mechanics of such a system would easily allow for that (and that it's probably a daily occurrence). OK, so a quick 10-mile, $60 roundtrip cab-ride later, we have our tickets.
No major mishaps at Disneyland- good times.
Remember how we'd save $15 on parking by taking the hotel shuttle? Yeah... The night clerk told me our return shuttle left Disney at 5:30- but apparently it was really 5:20. We showed up at the stop at 5:24, and the shuttle was gone- next one came at 9:20. We were all basically limping, so we took a cab back- another $25. That $15 we saved on parking sure was swell!
Saturday was relatively uneventful- we took MetroRail from Norwalk into Hollywood (a long ride with two train switches) and poked around- visited the Hollywood Museum and checked out a bunch of the other downtown Hollywood tourist haunts. The museum came highly recommended by Fodor's, but it seemed a little tired to me. There was a decent mix of old and new movie memorabilia (lots of costumes and props from various movies), but maybe I'm just not enough into old movies to really dig it. Another moment of panic at the front door when the little old lady working the admissions booth said our newly-reactivated credit card had come back as cancelled, but after watching her futz with the card reader and tell our friends the same thing about their card, I'm pretty sure she managed to hose it up somehow. Confirmed later when we bought dinner with that card. Whew. I was also sad that another museum listed in Fodor's we tried to see was gone- it was more of a "hands-on" museum that covered a lot of filmmaking equipment and techniques (lighting, foley, sound, etc).
Getting reservations in northern Orange County on Saturday night was tricky- after a number of tries we landed at J.T. Schmid's in Anaheim- looked close on the map, but was 12 miles from the hotel. Seared ahi appetizer was awesome, dinner was meh, dessert was great...
Took the car back to LAX, went through the inspection, all's well. As the guy was signing the paper, I made an offhand comment about the bondo and crappy repaint job, and he decides to fill out a damage report on it. Oy- shoulda kept my mouth shut! Luckily, it was already in the car's history report when he looked it up, but I'm half-expecting them to come back and try to bill me for it or something...
Got on the plane back to PDX, went out to the car, d'oh! Don't have the long term parking ticket- it was in my wallet! When we left, I was going to leave it in the car, but my wife pointed out that it says "Take this ticket with you". I couldn't figure out why, but I just did it... Stupid! Leave it in the car next time. I was figuring they'd bill us some exorbitant minimum amount, but they only billed us for four days. Apparently they either inventory the lot every day or they OCR the license plates off a security cam at the entrance- somehow they looked up our license number by the day we got in and just billed us full price for four days. Not bad...
Needless to say, I was quite happy to get home. It wasn't exactly a relaxing vacation, but we did have some good times with our friends, and I got my rollercoaster fix in for awhile.
No comments:
Post a Comment