We spent 4 days in Anaheim, California last week on a vacation. My husband had meetings, a trade show, and business dinners all of those days, but the kids and I got to just have fun and play! We stayed in the Grand Californian Hotel right on the Disney property. It is a beautiful hotel!
I’ll be blogging more about our trip soon, but I just had to share one of the most memorable moments for Memory Monday.
We were all sound asleep in our beds on Thursday night/Friday morning when my hubby started waking us up about 12:45 a.m. It took me a minute to register what he was saying because I was so very tired. He told me that the fire alarm was going off and we needed to get up. Sure enough, once I got my wits together, there was a very loud alarm going off. I can’t believe that the kids and I were sleeping through it (shows you what Disney exhaustion can do to a person!) There was not any visible fire or smoke in the hallway, but there were plenty of people evacuating. We threw on our clothes and I grabbed my purse and we headed out into the night. It was all very orderly, but there were many parents carrying sleeping and crying kids. Some people had just thrown on the hotel robes and didn’t even have shoes on. I’m sure they questioned this choice once we got outside.
There were several Disney officer looking guys guiding us on our way. Our group was led into the California Adventure Park and into a small restaurant (Taste Pilots café). Of course my hubby made a crack about getting early admission into the park. lol! Thankfully, we all got to sit down in the café for awhile (we found out that many other guests had to stand outside). We were there for about 30 minutes. No one told us anything. I wasn’t too nervous until I saw them handing out diapers to those with little children. Then I worried that we were going to be there awhile. All sorts of scenarios started to play out in my head. My kids were getting a bit stressed. Thankfully, Alex had grabbed his headphones so he could listen to music. It’s also worth noting that he grabbed his orthodontic elastics. His orthodontist will be so proud of him for grabbing those in an emergency situation! :) lol! I took a picture (yes, I had my camera in my purse!) It’s a terrible picture, but it certainly captures a memory.
Hubby was checking his voicemail/email on his phone and wishing he had his computer with him. (I was realizing that Hubby is even more of a workaholic than I thought he was. lol!) However, he did have other co-workers there in the same hotel and it was nice that he was so concerned about them. He texted one of them but his iphone auto correct ended up sending the message “ate you evacuating?” instead of “are you evacuating?” For some reason that seemed very funny to us later that night!
At almost 1:30 a.m. we were led back into the hotel with no explanation. My husband asked one of the officer guys what happened and he responded “Everything’s fine, it was just a code 4”. What?!? That was not a helpful answer and we are still laughing about that one. We are going to use that line from now on to describe any sort of vague thing that we don’t want to explain. We figure that “code 4” is another way of saying “some idiot pulled the fire alarm lever” because someone did say later that it was just a false alarm.
Exhaustion and stress caught up with us on the way back to the room and we all got a case of the giggles while we were shoved in an elevator with dozens of people. It was all so surreal and sort of funny once we knew that nothing was really burning down (or being attacked, etc.) It took us awhile to settle down and get back to sleep once we were back in the room. We were all very tired the next day!
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Some memories are just so very memorable, that you know you will never forget them. It’s still a good idea to write them down though, because time fades the experience and blurs the details. Do you have any evacuation stories? Any middle of the night fire alarms? Hopefully, they were as harmless as our experience was. Either way, it’s worth documenting the details for a Memory Monday exercise!
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