Universal Studios

L to R: Betsy, Evil Purple Minion, Cindy, Alyce

Cindy and Alyce (with camera at the ready) get ready for the Studio Tour.

So I met my sisters Cindy and Alyce in Anaheim this past weekend.  The ultimate purpose was Cindy's participation in the Star Wars 10K on January 14th, held at Disneyland.  But we took the drive up to Hollywood on January 13th to see Universal Studios. The 70 mile round trip from Anaheim took three hours. Yes, traffic was that bad. (Our thanks to Cindy's friends Chris and Heather for transport.)

Honeydukes.  Home of expensive solid chocolate frogs. 

Our first stop was Harry Potter's Wizarding World. We strolled through Hogsmeade, enjoying the fake snow on the roofs and the tilted chimneys. Cindy remarked that it looked just like Edinburgh, Scotland. We looked at chocolate frogs and fudge-flavored flies at Honeydukes.  We thought about getting Butterbeer. We worked our way to the ride called "Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey." The ride is cleverly contained within a recreation of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, complete with Ron Weasley's flying car pictured below.

Wow! Hogwarts! (or is it a castle in Edinburgh with junk car?)

Alyce and Cindy in front of the mythical griffin

We liked the ride so much we did it twice. You walk through Hogwarts(and a holographic Dumbledore telling us that we'll have to decide between what is right and what is easy), before you hop on your broomstick and soar over Hogwarts, get attacked by a dragon and spiders and play a little quidditch. Pretty spectacular.  We thought we'd dine at Three Broomsticks Restaurant, maybe have some bangers and mash and pumpkin juice, but the line was out the door. So we moved on to Springfield USA and stepped into the local Krusty Burger for a burger Lisa Simpson would approve of.  

The Krusty Burger filled us up, so we bypassed Lard Lad Donuts, but stopped for some photo ops. We would have stayed longer in Springfield, but had to hustle over to the Studio Tour, then the Minion ride, and then braved "The Walking Dead" exhibit (think really scary Haunted House), and then worked our way down to the Jurassic Park ride, where I got thoroughly soaked, but managed to avoid being eaten by carnivorous dinosaurs. And then we called it a day. A great day.  

Next to Lard Lad Donuts.  D'oh. 

Mother Nature Krusty Burger

Palomar Observatory

Benjamin, Samuel and Steven ascend the steps to the Hale Telescope

The Palomar Observatory has been on my bucket list for a few years. We finally made it out to Cal Tech's working observatory in December while Benjamin was home from college for winter break. It's about a two hour drive northeast of San Diego, and beautiful all the way. As an added bonus, there was old snow on the ground when we arrived, plenty for an impromtu snow fight among brothers.

After Benjamin and Samuel pummeled each other with the white stuff, we made our way to George Ellery Hale's greatest project, the 200 inch telescope that saw first light in 1949. Hale had secured funding in 1928, but it took another two decades to finish this beautiful, massive telescope. It was fittingly named after Hale, who himself was a renowned astronomer. The Hale telescope was the largest in the world until the Keck telescope was completed in Hawaii in 1992.  It's still in use daily by Cal Tech astronomers, who used it, among other things, to locate quasars -- galaxies very, very far from Earth with black holes at their centers.

The base of the Hale Telescope is visible behind Benjamin, Samuel and Steven.  

After the refreshing cold snap of Palomar, we stopped on the way home for lunch in Fallbrook, as the temperature climbed to 80. We tried the famous "Nessy Burgers" located off Old Highway 395. Very good, very big burgers.  And not a chain.

Samuel poses in the Nessy Burgers cut out.  The burgers are as big as displayed. 

Our trip to Palomar inspired Samuel to shop out a nice telescope for our very own back yard.  He is now equipped with several amateur astronomer books, and we'll take our Meade Polaris 130 with us when we take a trip to Yosemite this Spring.  In the meantime, he's got some cool shots of the moon and taken time elapsed pictures of the night sky.  See below.

View of the moon from our new backyard telescope