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Old 29 Dec 18, 02:11 PM  
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oh_darling
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Livin’ it up at the Hotel California - Introduction (October '18)

Livin’ it up at the Hotel California (October ‘18)

‘You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave!'




Hi everyone! After finally finishing my April ‘18 dining report I can now make a start on our October ‘18 California trippie, yay! Wedding/honeymoon trippie still has a few more days to go which I promise I will finish at SOME point, but the memories of our California trip are still relatively fresh in my mind so I wanted to make a start on this first So, let’s get to it!

I didn’t write a pre-trippie as things were extremely hectic and busy in the run up to the holiday and I just didn’t have the time. Basically, I first had the idea to go to California way way back, actually on our October 2016 honeymoon in WDW. I remember it really vividly; we were in Disney Springs and I just had a strong feeling that for our next trip I wanted to do something different and have some new stuff to plan. California is somewhere we’ve always both really wanted to go so this seemed like the perfect time

With starting a family on the horizon for us, we made the decision to try and get a bit more travel under our belts and so California was penciled in for late 2018. As you may know we managed a cheeky week-long trip to Orlando in April 2018 to celebrate Ben’s 30th which was sooooo fun, but did mean that we didn’t start planning or booking Cali until June! We booked our flights in June first and then it was a bit of a whirlwind to research a whole new area of the US and get everything booked. It was super fun though and we spent a lot of the summer sat out on our balcony with a glass of wine and the spreadsheet, chatting over our options

The Loose Deets

So! We decided quite early on that we didn’t want to drive, so we’d do internal flights. This also meant we were limited to how many places we could visit, but with a max 14 night trip, we were very conscious of getting to spend some quality time in the places we stayed. So this wasn’t an issue for us!

The Plan

Our first location was OBVIOUSLY Anaheim as Disneyland is somewhere we’ve wanted to visit since…forever! We also wanted to finish in Disneyland so that was to be our final stop. We wanted to see LA too, and we also researched San Francisco and fell in love with the look of it. So that became our trip! Fly into SF, fly down to LA, then finish in Anaheim. 4 or 5 nights in each so we’d have enough time to take it all in and really get to know each area. In about August we decided to add a night in Santa Monica too, after realizing how close to LAX it was, so we cut a night off our San Francisco time and had 1 night in Santa Monica.

The Flights

I began flight hunting waayyyy back in February and was pleasantly surprised with the prices I was seeing; £400-450 each into SFO and out of LAX which I thought was great. One morning in May I woke up and did my usual flight search then nearly fell out of bed when the price popped up - £350 each! They’d dropped! The slight issue was we’d literally just got back from Orlando and weren’t quite ready to book, so I reluctantly kept an eye on them over the next few weeks. They really fluctuated and it was interesting to see when they dropped then went back up. Finally, one morning before work in June, I checked them to see that they’d dropped to an all time low of £321 each, direct, into SFO and out of LAX, with United. We thought it wasn’t going to get any better than that so I grabbed the credit card and we got them all booked. We later realised we had to pay for a bag each but i think it was only £40 each so not bad at all! We were sooooo happy with these prices and to be honest they made this whole holiday possible! We also booked our internal flights with Delta for the bargainous price of $60 each!

The Hotels

Over the next few months we booked our accommodation and started to get everything sorted. I kept a document with costings on which I thought I’d share in case anyone’s interested; accommodation was generally quite pricey, especially SF which was RIDICULOUS, but we expected it so were prepared. I’d set a random, plucked out of nowhere budget of £100 a night and while we were roughly sort of not really but also sort of able to stick to this across the whole trip, SF went way over because we stuck to our guns and booked a hotel in the location we wanted, which was one of the best decisions we made! Ben has Perkbox, an employee rewards programme through work, which gives him money off a few different hotel booking sites so I was able to get some money off a few hotels which really helped! These were our hotels and what we paid:

San Francisco
Hotel Del Sol, £721 for 4 nights (!)
This was an absolutely fantastic hotel and we were so so happy with our stay! We had a lovely room, a king bed, staff were fantastic, there were free cookies every day at 3pm! Free breakfast which you took back up to your room which was super handy! The location was so so good, we were in Cow Hollow which was a cute neighbourhood with lots of lovely boutique shops, grocery stores and restaurants and the overall feeling was so nice. We were about a 35 minute walk to Fisherman’s Wharf which was great, and super close to the Presidio! Ahhh guys honestly it was just perfect and I’d recommend this hotel in particular to everyone if you want a friendly, safe, clean hotel. Knowing the prices of hotels in SF we felt this was fantastic value for money; some of the hotels in Fisherman’s Wharf were £350-400+ a night!

Santa Monica
Hotel Carmel, £145 for 1 night
We were only here for 1 night so our focus was on location, which we nailed! Literally minutes walk to the pier which was amazing. The hotel lobby was beautiful, the room was quite dated but very clean, if a little snug. It really didn’t matter thought because like I said we were literally only there to sleep!

LA
Hilton Garden Inn Burbank, £600 for 4 nights
We chose to base ourselves in Burbank for this portion of our trip because we’d heard LA was a bit rough (correct) and we wanted to go the WB Studios and Universal which are both in Burbank. Plus we Googled Burbank and it looked SO NICE and we immediately fell in love with it and decided we needed to stay there. Would 100% recommend this it was an absolute beaut of a hotel, beautiful lobby, huge posh room with floor to ceiling windows and a HUGE king bed and TV, super nice, safe location 2 minutes walk from Burbank town centre with sooooo many shops and restaurants. Amazing hotel!

Anaheim
The Anaheim Hotel, £542 for 5 nights
Again, a lovely hotel and super cheap! Just over £100 a night wooooo! One of the closest, cheapest hotel to the parks, possibly the closest/cheapest! Was literally 12 minutes walk from the hotel to Disney property which was a DREAM because we could nip back to the hotel for a nap and it was so different to WDW! No brekkie but we walked to Walgreens and got breakfast stuff, and more importantly there’s an AMAZING Blaze pizza esque place literally in the hotel so we got that late one night and I wish we’d got it more but we were just so full haha! But ahhhh it was amazing, lovely room with 2 Queens, a balcony! Big TV, nice shower...not as premium feeling as our Burbank hotel but exactly what we needed for this portion of the trip.

The Activities

So, that was our flights and accommodation! We then tried to book as much as we could beforehand and pay for it, so that actual spending money would be less as by the time we got to the holiday we were SKINT.COM so it worked well, but yes nonetheless this was a very expensive holiday and I do pride myself on my bargain hunting!

These are some of the activities I can remember that we booked and paid for upfront…

Hop On Hop Off SF Bus Tour - £84

Walt Disney Family Museum - £35

Alcatraz Night Tour - $90

Golden Gate Bridge Whale Watching $95

Dearly Departed Tour (one of the best things I’ve ever done IN MY LIFE) $120

Warner Bros Studio Tour £84

Universal Hollywood £150

Disneyland - 5 day Park Hoppers (obvs) £440

Walk in Walt’s Disneyland Footsteps $110 each I think (we had MAJOR drama with this, it was fully booked when I called up a month before apart from our last day so after MUCH umming and ahhing, like I was on the phone with the poor woman for 40 minutes, we decided ‘flip it’ and booked it for our last morning. It was fine, we had to super rush Walt’s Apartment tour unfortunately but we still spent some decent time in there and got photos etc. I cried when we first called up and she said it was fully booked so Ben said we had to do it, and I’m so glad we did. Worth every single penny!)

Flippin’ eck that’s a lot of money. It really helped having so much paid for though, although saying that we still had to watch our spends each day and not go too mad!

Overall, it was an absolutely incredible holiday and we’re both dying to go back. Benj even said it was his favourite trip bar the wedding trip! High praise indeed. It was so lovely to try something a bit different and I really loved all the planning and researching of all the new places. We also enjoyed travelling around and getting to see some more of our favourite country.

I’m super busy these days with work and other bits and bobs but I really love having our trippies to look back on so please bear with me as I try to get all our memories recorded to share with you guys. I found California trip reports so helpful when I was planning so I want to return the favour! It’s just been so much effort lately with Photobucket messing everything up and now Flickr! So I’m going to try the Dibb photo uploader, wish me luck!

So without further ado, let’s take a look at some of my highlights from the holiday before we delve into the actual trip report Happy reading and I really hope you enjoy our trip!





























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Old 29 Dec 18, 08:51 PM  
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I look forward to reading this! We did California for the 1sr time in 2017 & can't wait to go back next year! Love it
I think we will do Walts footsteps tour as we didn't have time last time
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Old 29 Dec 18, 09:06 PM  
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Looking forward to reading along! Love the start of it already! I’m going to SF in April & cant wait! I’ve been to Santa Monica & Hollywood & Disneyland & going back on this trip to SF! Love the pics!
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Old 30 Dec 18, 12:40 AM  
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Sounds as though you had an amazing trip, looking forward to reading more.
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Old 12 Jan 19, 10:52 PM  
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Excited for this new trippie x
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Old 13 Jan 19, 09:16 AM  
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Love your trip reports... always so detailed & entertaining... can’t wait as it will bring back memories of my 2013 trip to Disneyland 😁
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Old 13 Jan 19, 09:34 AM  
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Sounds like you had a great time. Really looking forward to reading this, I love your trip reports.
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Old 20 Jan 19, 10:25 PM  
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So pumped to see this trip report has begun!
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Old 6 Feb 19, 09:19 PM  
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Originally Posted by hawki View Post
I look forward to reading this! We did California for the 1sr time in 2017 & can't wait to go back next year! Love it
I think we will do Walts footsteps tour as we didn't have time last time
Yay! So glad you're excited, I'm jealous you're going back! I'd really really recommend the tour, it was such a highlight for us 100% recommend if you can squeeze it in! xxx

Originally Posted by LOU LOU DISNEY View Post
Looking forward to reading along! Love the start of it already! I’m going to SF in April & cant wait! I’ve been to Santa Monica & Hollywood & Disneyland & going back on this trip to SF! Love the pics!
Thank you so much! Ahhh you're going to Love SF, we just absolutely fell in love with it! And so amazing that you're going back to SM and Hollywood! We just had the best trip, would love to do it again one day xxxx
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Old 6 Feb 19, 09:20 PM  
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Originally Posted by DizzyDisneyMum View Post
Sounds as though you had an amazing trip, looking forward to reading more.
Thank you, we really really did! Hope you enjoy reading all about it xxx

Originally Posted by princess allie View Post
Excited for this new trippie x
Thank you! I hope you enjoy! xxx
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