Grandma horsies, Grandma and Grandpa Beach

November 2nd, 2008 / posted by Jake

Since having purchased the Honda Odyssey 4-5 months ago, traveling has become a lot easier.  Well traveling with young kids has become a lot easier, especially long distances….  Kaitlyn has “graduated” to a larger, forward facing car seat and Tyler has a big-boy booster chair with lights.  He loves it because he can buckle himself in and out and at night he turns his lights on.  The lights are built into the seat on both sides and we figured they would come in handy for when he wants to read books at night.  Well they have certainly come in handy – it helps him to read the buttons on his DVD player so he can rewind and pause it with ease.  From a drivers perspective the lights are really annoying.  They are small, bright, LED lights and it causes our van to glow or radiate at night similarly to a sun-tan bed only brighter.  When looking through the rear view mirror, all I see are two lights staring directly back at me the entire time reminding me that I should have not put the batteries in them and even told Tyler they existed.

For a 3 day weekend, we drove to Irvine to visit Grandma and Grandpa Ashlock (or grandma and grandpa beach as Tyler refers to them because they love on the beach).  While down there we spent the day at Sea World with Grandma horsies and nicole.  Our originals plans were to goto Disneyland but after talking to friends we learned that Disneyland might not be as fun for Tyler at his age but Sea World would be. While at Sea World we saw the Shamoo, sea lion, dolphin, and the dog & cat shows.  We really enjoyed the sea otter show because they did a good job of including the crowd and the majority of the show was comedic which was good.  Towards the end we went and played on a HUGE jungle gym which consisted mainly of large cat walks and rope ladders.

I decided to take Tyler up to one of the cat walks and in order to get to it you have to climb up and around on a huge tunnel of ropes (see below picture).  It’s pretty difficult especially when its full of kids and parents like myself.

(This is it only it was full of people)

So after spending 10-15 minutes of navigating around this thing, we finally made it to a part where you have to climb up a single rope which brings you to a new section of the cat walks.  Well Tyler and I got there and all these other kids kept grabbing the rope and climbing up it before we could so we waited, and waited, and waited.  I kept looking around to see if their parents were there to help out but of course they weren’t.  So I decided to let them have it and I shook them all off and watched them come crashing back down.  I hoisted Tyler up and began pushing him higher and higher when out of nowhere some parent decides he can’t wait and he climbs the fence next to the rope we were climbing.  He then pushes Tyler down and makes his way into the opening at the top.  After finally making it to the top I stand up and see the adult who had previously pushed Tyler to the side.  I decided the adult was now in our way and stiffened up the entire right side of my body and slammed it into this back saying a few choice words in dutch (shouting obscenities in a foreign language makes me feel not as guilty) throwing him to the ground so Tyler and I could keep walking.  Awesome.

So after this whole experience everyone decided it might be time to leave so we went and stood in line to go on the Journey to Atlantis roller coaster ride.  I waited with Tyler, Amanda, Brandon (Amanda’s son), and Jakob (Amanda’s boyfriend) while Lindsey, her mom, Priscilla, and Nicole went on the ride.  What made this ride fun was it was a water roller coaster and there is a section which goes right by where we were standing.  We, the people not on the ride, could pay a quarter and hose everyone on the ride down for a brief 2-3 seconds.  So we stood and waited for Lindsey and the gang eager to hose them down.  Well when they finally appeared, we had already missed our window of opportunity to hose them down.  Luckily the ride goes in a 1/2 circle and on the other side of where we were standing was another place where we could pay a quarter and hose em down.  So I took off running to this location through a huge crowd of people and when I got there I fed the machine 3-4 quarters and let them have it.  After they had passed us completely I walked back to where I was standing and asked Amanda “where is Tyler?” to which she responded, “he went running off with you.”

Crap.  I quickly did a 360 looking in the immediate vicinity to see if he was just lagging behind.  Nope.  By this time it was dark out and the exterior lights had come on.  I ran back to where I fed the machine a couple quarters thinking he might be there.  Nope.  I quickly remembered – when I first took off running I had to criss cross my way through a crowd.  My heart dropped because I had done the unthinkable – I lost Tyler in a theme park at night.  Then I realized I had to find him asap especially before Lindsey got off the ride so I took off in a full spring running towards the direction of the ride (as noted in blue).  I did a few quick circles just looking, not stopping, and then ran back to where everything started and looked again.  I continued sprinting passed the lines and crowds and came to a Y and decided to go left.  As I was turning left, to my right I saw a huge crowd of people waving their arms, jumping up and down.  I continued left but came to a skidding hault just like in the cartoons.  I turned back and looked at them and they were jumping up and down waving more but not saying ANYTHING which confused me.  So I took off running in their direction and when I rounded a corner, there was Tyler being helped by a Sea World Employee.  From where I first lost him to where he ended up was probably +500 feet away.  To make things worse, he was completely out of my direct sight because in order for him to get to where he did, he had to make a large right turn which eventually curved left.

Well Lindsey finally got off the ride and we played it off so Lindsey if you’re reading this now, Surprise!

MAP KEY:
Red is Tyler’s path and you can see where he ended up.
Orange is my original path when I was squirting them.
Blue is my panic path.  You can see where I turned left hoping he had gone left
but as it turned out he want right and up.
Light-Purple is the group of people waving at me.

Tags: sea-world