California Road Trip Preview

Happy Holidays in California

Dec 10 – 28, 2015

“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, everywhere you go
Take a look in the Five-and-Ten
It’s glistening once again
With candy canes and silver lanes aglow.”

December. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. And in December 2015 we were in a wonderful place to celebrate it.

We wanted a chilly but not an entirely freezing year-end holiday.  We wanted warm Disney moments, perhaps some soul-enriching road trips, and also, we wanted hot chocolate after a whole day of fun in the snow.   We wanted to be in a place where Christmas is celebrated, after all our family is Catholic and Christmas is our favourite time of the year.

With all these wishes taken into account and fueled by our family’s love for travel and enthusiasm for adventure, we headed to California, USA!  Thanks to my friend Karen (who also loves to travel and plan them) who gave us this brilliant idea of road trippin’ in the USA.  We flew from Singapore to Los Angeles via Narita on December 10.  We started in San Diego, up to Anaheim and LA, tracked California’s legendary road trip route, the Pacific Coast Highway, stopping by at Cambria, Monterey and driving further up to San Francisco.  We pushed a bit further up and headed to Sacramento and Tahoe before driving back to San Francisco for our flight back to Singapore.

Like our previous travels, we created our own itinerary.  Benjamin and Joaquin helped out in planning for the Sea World, Disney, Petersen Museum, Universal Studios and Squaw Valley legs of our trip.  Researching about these places got them more excited about our holiday.  Thanks to Benjamin too because he took the initiative to plan most of our driving routes via google maps.  He was our official navigator and DJ for the road trip.  Here’s how our 2015 Happy Holidays in California itinerary looked like:

 

Click 1, 2, 3 if you’d like to view our itinerary.

Although with itinerary, we did not get to do all the activities on the days that we planned them either because of uncooperative weather or unexpected illness. But it was okay. I guess that’s the beauty of traveling free-and-easy, it gave us opportunities to embrace changes and appreciate spontaneity.

“Frosty the snowman is a fairy tale, they say
He was made of snow
But the children know how he came to life one day!”

And so Christmas was all around California.  Everywhere we went there were brightly-lit Christmas trees, joyful carols, and happy cheers.  These plus hot chocolate and beer kept us warm amidst the chilly Californian winter.

For starters, here are some of our pictures with Christmas trees in different sizes and interesting themes during our entire holiday in California.

Merry jingles from Santa’s Christmas Village in San Diego…

 Here are some of the trees during the Disney Fantasy Parade.

 

At Disney California Adventures, the trees were slightly unconventional.

 

And these were the trees in Tahoe.

Will give you more details of our 2015 American adventures in my next posts.   It took me a while to start this series of entries but now that I’ve started, hopefully, I’d finish before next Christmas!  *wink*