Welcome back! In case you missed them, catch up on part 1 and part 2 for stories of the first 5 days of our California vacation 🙂
We decided to make the most of being on the west coast, and drive down the Pacific Coast Highway on the way to Anaheim. Yes, we were headed to Disneyland!
Driving down the coast was amazing. It was foggy until about lunch time, but we pulled over pretty frequently to take pictures anyway. We got some cool ones, even with the overcast weather. I’ll let the pictures tell the story from here 🙂
We pulled into Anaheim around 7:30pm, and I have to tell you guys about our Airbnb. As he mentioned in this post, Corey has a pretty sizeable truck. Sometimes he has to search for a parking spot longer than normal because it’s so tall. This proved to be problematic. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
When Corey was working in Ireland, he took quite a few weekend trips to other European cities (most of which made it on to the list), and he stayed in several Airbnbs. He had great experiences with them, so when he suggested staying in one for our couple nights in Anaheim, I was totally game! We found one that was reasonably priced, the pictures looked like it was a cute apartment in a pleasant neighborhood, all was good, right?
Well.
We pulled in, and immediately both of us were kind of sketched out. The neighborhood was more run down than we were anticipating. Not a bad neighborhood specifically, but definitely not the quaint suburbs we’re used to and were expecting. Strike 1. We get to the apartment to discover that it was more barren than a college bachelor’s place! No decorations on the wall, the couch might have been picked up off the side of the road, it was depressing and unsettling. Completely unlike the pictures, which we realized were staged by the property manager renting out the place. Strike 2.
Strike 3 involved the truck. When we booked, a parking garage was mentioned, which Corey’s truck normally fits in. So we were going to be good on parking. However, “parking garage” actually meant a single car, walled off garage space. The top of his camper shell scraped the door while pulling in (scratched the paint, nothing more than cosmetic damage, but still annoying), and his brush guard stuck out beyond the edge of the garage, meaning we couldn’t close the door and lock the truck in for the night. So our choices were to park illegally on the street and risk getting towed, or keep it in an open garage and give someone with ill intentions a prime spot to hide.
At that point, we looked at each other and decided to bail. I hopped on my phone and found us a hotel about 5 miles away, which turned out to be the best decision we could’ve made. It was more expensive, but it took care of some things we hadn’t thought about. The hotel had a shuttle to and from the park, which meant we didn’t need to worry about parking during the day. The hotel also had breakfast in the mornings, which we would’ve had to figure out had we stayed at the Airbnb. All in all, everything definitely worked out better staying at a hotel!
I’ll wrap this post up here, and I’ll tell you all about Disneyland in the next post 🙂
Later,
Aiden
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