My family traveled to Los Angeles this winter break.
Los Angeles being a car-centric city, I rented a car, and I decided it was time to finally try out an electric car, something I had wanted to do for a long time. It was a Tesla Model 3, and notwithstanding my opinion of Tesla’s CEO, I loved the car. However, being the old fashioned sort, I did not trust its assistive driving features at all, so even while I tried them out, I was laser-focused on taking over if needed, which was a little tiring. Fortunately, the car didn’t do anything crazy. However, it was embarassing as I had trouble figuring out how to do things that I was used to doing easily in other cars, such as the simple task of turning on the car, although it was very simple once I got used to it.
Obviously because we were in the Los Angeles area, we had to go to Universal Studios and Disneyland. They were both a lot of fun. In fact, they were a lot more fun than I was expecting.
We spent the extra money to upgrade our park passes to get onto shorter lines, which was not cheap. However, it would have been a bigger waste to have flown all the way to Los Angeles just to spend 90% of our time waiting in line, so it was worth it in our case. A surprise was how good the food at Disneyland was. I was expecting it to be the standard overpriced fare for an amusement, but while still overpriced, it was far better than I expected it to be.
Being the Star Wars fan I am, I loved being at the Galaxy’s Edge in Disneyland. The lines for the Rise of the Resistance ride were extremely long, and I could see why after taking a ride on it. If I were on my own, I would not have been able to resist all the Star Wars merchandise on sale and would have returned home with a full set of Jedi attire, stormtrooper gear, and custom droids. As it was, we did build our own custom lightsaber, and I love it. I also greatly enjoyed seeing all the best military fighters up close.
However, it was odd seeing a piece of junk among all the great spacecraft.
Finally, I flew on the air flights to and from Los Angeles the best way there is to fly: watching and reading about investigations of air crashes. Learning about how airplanes crash and how their causes were found was a great way to spend the time while flying. (I am not sure if I should be serious or ironic on this.)