In April, a friend of mine will be visiting the USA for the first time. It is her for her to get time off from work so this was something we had to plan way in advance to make sure work would permitted. When she told me she wanted to visit me, she asked gave me two options: Visit Grand Canyon or visit New York. With only 1 week, I knew doing both would be impossible. And also, she has never flown for longer than 2 hours so I did not know what she would be like after crossing the waters. So we decided on Grand Canyon.
I have been to Grand Canyon several times now and there are places I’ve never been to but to make it a memorable trip for her, I planned it as if I was visiting for the very first time. I didn’t mind going back to the same places because every time I see them, it is still amazing. (In the last 4 years, I’ve been 3 times and it never gets old. I want to go hiking there but that will have to wait.)
She and I are both Disney nerds so we had to slip in Disneyland somehow. I purposely left the first day empty to see how she would be feeling after the long flight. And once in Las Vegas, I knew we would be doing a lot of driving so I wanted to leave a lot of error time for just in cases. Since it was semi-confirmed, I purchased the airfare tickets, hotels, rental car, and the Antelope Canyon Tour. Also, there was a sale going on for 3 day passes at Disneyland and it was cheaper than buying 2 day passes so we hopped on that. However, we had to make a HUGE change to our schedule.
My friend went to an autograph signing event for Andy from Shinhwa. Since he is from California, she asked him for recommendation. (Note: At signing events, you can ask a question on a post-it and the artist will usually respond to it)
A: San Diego Sea World
With his answer, my friend contacted me and said “I want to go to Sea World.” Welp. Time to change our plans around. We couldn’t change too much of it since most of it was paid for. But we could make our schedule a bit tight to make things fit. I didn’t want to make the trip hard for her but she wanted to push to see everything since she didn’t know when she would be back again. So we altered our schedule to include Sea World. The last time I went to Sea World was when I was… 10? So this would be something “new” for me as well.
So now, this is our plan. We have less than 30 days left for this trip so I hope we can stick to this. We will be heading over to Disneyland right after I pick up my friend from LAX and I really hope she will be ok. I will also need to get some good-night sleep before she comes so I can have the energy to run this plan myself! But overall, I cannot wait for her to visit me 🙂
Moons on the Move 