Tonight I decided that we needed to go to Disneyland, so we did. (Remember that we have annual passes, so it's not quite as impulsive as it sounds.)
You can tell that summer is getting closer -- the park was surprisingly crowded for two hours before closing time on a Monday night. Getting around was made even more difficult by the number of parents pushing Urban Assault Strollers -- gigantic behemoths being wielded with absolutely no concern for surrounding pedestrians. Suddenly stop our two-child, doublewide stroller diagonally in the middle of a narrow, busy pathway, or right at the bottom of a flight of stairs? Sure, why not? Keep nudging the person in front of us in the back of the knees? You bet! I suspect (although I don't want to make any generalizations here) that more than a few of these stroller gladiators are the same people who'll drive their Ford Expedition around you on the shoulder to jump a few more carlengths ahead, sipping a latte with one hand while giving you the bird with the other.
But it wasn't all crowds and bitterness.
Shelby and I rode the new Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters ride, which is basically a high-tech improvement on the old-fashioned shooting gallery. Your ride vehicle comes with a couple of "Astro Blasters" and a joystick to spin the car around. You ride through a series of rooms; various alien and robot baddies (in the service of the Evil Emperor Zurg) pop up; you shoot at them with your Astro Blaster, spinning around the car to give you better aim. Big LED score displays in the dashboard of each car give each rider instant feedback on how well he's doing.
A surprise comes once you get off: instead of paying $5.00 for a lousy copy of a picture of you onboard the ride, you can E-mail a picture of yourself -- for free! with your score! -- to the address of your choice. That is, if you can bear to wait in line behind the crowds of preteens trying to remember their best friend's E-mail address (and whether it's spelled "sk8rd00d420@yahoo.com", or is it "skaterdude-4twenty@hotmail.com" instead?)
