Our final Day

Saturday 11th October

Day 23

I had left our plans open for Saturday, not knowing how tired the kids would be after the party, we still had our tickets for Universal Studios if they were up to it.

The kids didn't wake up too early for a change, and we decided to walk over to Mimi's for some breakfast.  It was a beautiful day.

Once we were done it was packing time, we managed to squeeze everything in, except we still had a bag of dirty laundry, so we decided to go via Walmart so we could pick up an extra bag to bring with us.  Then we continued on to Hollywood.

It seemed to take forever to get to Universal Studios, there was a ton of traffic.

But we made it into the park, I think it was close to one by that time.  This is another place built on hills, they do have escalators to ride on BUT you have to take the child out of the stroller to ride, which always makes things a little harder.  We went to the curious George play area first, then we decided to go down to the lower lot, Hunter was going to brave the Jurassic Park ride.

I waited with Kenzie and Kingston while they rode

 

And got this picture just as they came down

That's them in the 2nd row.

Hunter didn't LOVE the ride, it was a little scary for him, so we decided to ride the 171 escalators back  to the upper level.

We stopped halfway for a photo op.

Craig and Hunter wanted to try out the Simpsons Ride.  



It had a wait time of 25 minutes, so we agreed to meet back there in about 40 minutes, and I took Kenzie and Kingston for a walk through the park.

We saw the Incredible Hulk

Some interesting Halloween decorations

I guess Woody Woodpecker was a vampire for Halloween!

Kenzie tried out the Harley from Terminator 2

And Kingston wanted a ride too

We saw Donkey from Shrek and Kenzie went to talk to him and get her picture

Then we saw Shrek himself

We went back to wait for the boys, and ran into Bart Simpson

The boys had loved the ride, we decided to hurry over to the Shrek 4d movie which was due to start.  Once again Hunter was frightened.  I had to sit way in the back with Kingston on non-moving seats, which was ok.

Afterwards we got to see Spongebob Squarepants, who Hunter had been hoping to meet.  The kids love Spongebob.

We were getting hungry, and running out of time, so we decided to leave then, and go to Hard Rock Cafe for a quick dinner before we went to the airport.

This is Hunter in front of the Universal Globe

Universal Studios is okay, but it's no Disneyland.  I guess older kids might enjoy it, but it's not really worth a full day there.

We managed to get to the Alamo at LAX, turn the car in and get on a shuttle to the airport pretty quickly, then it was all that fun security stuff. We didn't have to wait too long before we boarded our 13 hour flight.  I think Kenzie barely made it through dinner before she was out, and she slept until breakfast, so probably 11 hours of the flight.  The boys did pretty well too.

It was almost 6am Monday 13th October when we landed in Auckland.  It was such a relief to be home, but we were sad that our trip was over.  Craig had to fly back to Sydney bright and early the next morning, so we had a quiet day at home, unpacking and doing laundry, while the kids got to rediscover their toys.