parktrotter

Again, the corporate link , since I like this one so much.

Scattered through the area of the Redwood Creek Challenge Trail are little “challenges”: a rock climbing wall, some hollow logs for the smaller kids to slide down, and a show based on the movie Brother Bear. Everyone’s favorite is the zip lines. The Disney Lies website describes them thus: “A simple but entertaining ride, guests are allowed to hang from a rope attached to a zip line as it speeds down a low hill, and then hold on for dear life when it comes to a sudden, chiropractor-pleasing stop. When this ride first opened, any guest could partake of its pleasures. But its addictive thrills led to long lines, forcing Disney to impose height and age restrictions in an effort to cut down on traffic. Because the ride continued to be over-attractive, these restrictions have had to be refined to the point that, at the time of this writing, it can only be used by 36″ tall, eight-year-old girls.”

They’re exaggerating, a little. Lewis was just barely tall enough to ride these for the first time, and found them thrilling.

Of this one, too, I approve. I approve of it so much that I’ll give the corporate advertising link .

Redwood Creek Challenge Trail is in the California Adventure park. The idea is that the visitor is in a national forest in the Sierra and is either training to become a firefighter or ranger or is just goofing around in the woods—it’s not clear to me, and it doesn’t matter. You climb through a kind of Habitrail maze made of netting, higher and higher; the netting hangs between towers that are designed to look like fire lookouts. Parents chug along behind children on the uncertain netting. Children fall on the netting, to no bad effect, and the younger ones get their shoes caught. One mom had to try to fish her four-year-old’s shoe out from underneath the netting, and got lucky when another adventurer proved to have a hand and wrist thin enough for the task. The more mayhem I saw, the more I approved. The kids were all delighted.

We’re traveling again, visiting family in the farm country near Merced, California. We spent Christmas day there, where our boys played with their cousins (eight years old, six years old, three years old–oh, the noise, noise, noise, NOISE). I just realized that we have spent the last three Christmases in this same hotel, the Ramada on Childs Avenue next to highway 99. Again, I usually hate hotels, but I have grown fond of this one, and I wanted to take a brief break from the Disney-blogging and give them a good review.

In a limited way, at least: we have stayed every time in the family suite, and always only on Christmas night, so this may be the hotel-review equivalent of Daffy’s insurance policy (the one that covers a black eye obtained in a hailstorm on the Fourth of July in a stampede of elephants and one baby zebra, etc). But at $129, I think it’s a bargain: you get two big rooms, two TVs, two coffee machines, two bathrooms, etc. One room has two queen beds, one has one big king. This is not a fancy place, mind you: we need new fixtures in the bathroom, where the tiling, for instance, is quaint–and I don’t mean bed-and-breakfast-in-Vermont quaint, I mean old-and-busted quaint. But in the end, these are minor flaws.

And this is Merced, where the most prominent local feature is probably the gang-banger graffiti, visible on every flat surface along the highway and everywhere else. They need to clean it up by any means possible. Let’s get convicts out on chain gangs if necessary, painting that garbage over; they’re otherwise advertising the unlivable quality of this whole area in the loudest tones.

Graffiti aside, the Ramada is convenient for Yosemite National Park; the highway 140 exit for the park is just north on 99.