The Watsons go to Birmingham is a book about a family named the Watsons and their trip to Birmingham. Their neighbors in Flint, Michigan call them the Weird Watsons, because many things that they do seem weird and mysterious to their neighbors. The Watson family consists of Kenny, who is the person telling the story, Byron, and Joetta. Byron is Kenny’s older brother and is thirteen. Byron is an ‘official juvenile delinquent’ according to Kenny, and Kenny is bullied by Byron and his friends. Joetta, who’s nickname is Joey, is Kenny’s younger sister. Joetta strongly supports Byron and even tries to stop their mother from disciplining Byron when he is caught playing with matches. The family owns one brown car which they call the Brown Bomber. The family travels to Birmingham in this car to see their Grandma Sands. They hope that Grandma Sands will help Byron calm down a little bit. They go to Birmingham in the summer. When in Birmingham, scary things happen that do indeed calm Byron down. To learn more about these scary happenings, read the book!
This story is about a loving family and their triumphs, scares, travels, and difficulties. I would give this book a 6 out of 10 because the vocabulary could have been better, and the point the book was trying to get across was a little hard to understand at times.
The cold can be ignored when having tons of fun. That’s exactly what we did at Disney’s California Adventure a few months ago. As cold as it was, it didn’t matter to us if we had our jackets on or not! Disney’s California Adventure was simply too entertaining! After we parked in the Mickey and Friends Parking Structure at 7:00 A.M., we took two escalators down to the tram, which took us to Downtown Disney.
If you’ve never seen Downtown Disney, you’re missing out on something big. Your mom or dad will never get bored strolling through the shops and looking at all of Disney’s merchandise. You yourself will be fascinated.
At the entrance was an area where we got our bags checked, and although Disney has added much more security since we last went, the bag check didn’t take much time. We walked over to the California Adventure entrance. We got our tickets scanned, picked up three maps, and off we went on our California Adventure!
First, we walked to Cars Land. It was still 7:30, and you wouldn’t imagine how crowded it was already! We waited for about 45 minutes in a line for the ride, “Radiator Springs.” The ride was completely engaging as we rolled along in our six-seater car. After seeing some of “Ornament Valley,” we raced against another car at full speed. We rolled over hills, performed sharp turns, and zoomed along to the finish line! The race felt a little like being on a roller coaster, but we can’t really say that because we’ve never been on a roller coaster!
After that fabulous ride, we walked to the other end of Disney’s California Adventure, to arrive at our mom’s favorite ride, “Soarin’ Over California!” We waited in line for about 25 minutes. We were taken to a huge room with rows and rows of seats. We sat in these seats and watched a movie while our chairs were suspended in the air, so that it looked like we were actually soaring over California! If you ever go on this ride, you will smell the scent of oranges as you ‘soar’ over groves of orange trees! We also flew over the Golden Gate Bridge, Los Angles, Orange County, and San Diego, and also a golf course. But be warned, if you’re afraid of heights, this would not be a very good choice for you!
Where should we go now? At the Redwood Creek Challenge Trail (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
Next, we made our way over to the ride, “Jumping Jellyfish”. On our way, we saw a sign saying, “Redwood Creek Challenge Trail.” It looked interesting, so we spoke to a Disney employee dressed as a park ranger. He gave us a map, and we saw that beyond the sign, were a series of trails with six challenges for us to complete. The challenges included animal tracking, bravery, rock climbing, howling like a wolf, finding your animal spirit, and puzzle solving. We had lots of fun doing this, and highly recommend stopping here!
Taking a break with Aunty Lisa (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
We continued on our way to the “Jumping Jellyfish” ride but had to stop again to have a snack; we were quite hungry after all the challenges we had done at Redwood Creek. We,(Kiran, Simran, and Svara) each had a moist, delicious chocolate croissant, while sharing a hot chocolate. Our mom and dad had tea and a plain croissant. Aunty Lisa, our mom’s friend, had a gingerbread cookie and a mocha. When we were finished licking the crumbs off our fingers, and drinking the last drops of hot chocolate, we entered the line for the Little Mermaid ride, another stop before the “Jumping Jellyfish” ride! We sat in a slow-moving clam shell and listened to the story of Ariel, while watching beautiful toys acting out the tale. It was mesmerizing!
Jumping Jelly Fish! (Image by the Jayasinghe family)
After that relaxing “Little Mermaid” ride, we finally walked over to the “Jumping Jellyfish” ride. The ride takes you high up on a tower while seated in a contraption that looks like a jellyfish. With two of us to a jellyfish, we rose up and down three times. We rose pretty high up!
Up next was King Triton’s carousel. King Triton’s carousel didn’t have horses. Instead, it had sea creatures. One of us picked a dolphin, and the other two picked a fish with purple scales. Along the way to the carousel, we stopped at a shop, admiring the keychains, Elsa and Anna pens, and other trinkets and souvenirs.
It’s a parade! We watched the Viva Navidad, latin-themed holiday street party, while having lunch (Image by the Jayasinghe Family).
We had been having so much fun, we had forgotten the time! Amazingly, it was already four o’clock, and since our stomachs were growling, we went to eat lunch at the Boardwalk Pizza and Pasta resteraunt. We (Kiran, Simran, and Svara) had ravioli and chocolate milk. While we were eating lunch, we caught a glimpse of the Disney Viva Navidad parade. The parade is supposed to show Mexican traditions, including dancing and singing.
There were many dancers, and they all wore colorful and bright costumes, which really made the show very interesting.
Snow in California?!! Playing in the “snow” at Oalf’s snow fest (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
We let our lunch digest a little and went to the Frozen (movie) Sing-Along Celebration. At the Sing-Along Celebration, we sang many songs from the movie Frozen, with Anna and Elsa-including Let It Go! As we sang, fake snow fell from the ceiling. Then, we headed to Olaf’s snow fest, where we met Olaf, tobogganed, and played with artificial snow.
After playing in the snow we made our way to the Aladdin show at the Hyperion theater. We were a little late to the show, and we were assigned balcony seating. Oops! Our favorite character in the Aladdin show was the Genie. The Genie is a comical character and his script included many jokes about recent events. The rest of the cast is great too, but the Genie was, to us at least, the funniest character.
Although the show was very enjoyable, we wanted to get back on some rides. We made our way to “A Bugs Land” and went on a ride called Flik’s Flyers. On this ride, we went in a hot air balloon who’s top was made of leaves, rising up and down. Then we went to Heimlich’s Chew Chew Train ride where we ride in a caterpillar car through foods. The caterpillar pretended to eat it. We wanted to see the the 3D movie called “It’s Tough To Be A Bug”. Unfortunately, Disney had temporarily replace it with the trailer to a new movie called “The Good Dinosaur”. This new Disney movie was going to be released the following weekend. Though we were disappointed at the change, we watched the trailer anyway.
It was time to leave. On our way out of the park we stopped at “The Fidler, Fifer, & Practical Cafe” and had a large gingerbread man cookie each. We also caught the last part of the night parade. Our mom spent some time looking through a couple of shops, and then we left for the tram.
Our visit to California Adventure was memorable. We managed to go on a lot of rides, including a couple that we had never done before. We had so much fun that we didn’t feel tired until we came back home. We are sure that you will enjoy your visit as much as we did too!
On our trip to Arizona, we went to the Sonoran Desert museum. If you would like to learn more about our trip to Arizona and the desert museum, click here. When I got home, I decided to research the deserts in California. A desert is a dry area that gets very little amounts of rain per year and where nothing much grows. The hottest, driest desert in the world is the Atacama Desert in Chile. Deserts are usually next to mountains because the mountains create a rainshadow (All the moisture in the cloud falls in the mountain and nothing is left for the desert). Sometimes though, it does rain in the desert, and when it rains, it rains a lot! But, the water doesn’t stay. It evaporates or the plants take it up.
I found that there are three deserts in California: The Mojave Desert, which is mainly in southern California, and southern Nevada; The Great Basin Desert, which is above the Mojave desert and is the largest desert in the U.S.; and the Colorado desert which is part of the Sonoran desert is located in the southernmost part of California.
The Sonoran Desert stretches from Southern Arizona to New Mexico and there is even a bit in Mexico and Baja California. I was wondering why it is called the Sonoran Desert and found out that it covers the western half of the Mexican state of Sonora, and since it covers such a lot of this state it is named after it. It is home to 60 species of mammals, 350 species of birds, 20 amphibian species, 30 native fish species, 100 different reptile species, 1,000 native bee species, and 2,000 native plant species. Part of the desert is also home to the last population of Jaguars living in North America. It is also home to the Saguaro cacti.
The Saguaro cacti is what many of us picture when we talk about a desert.
Posing at the entrance! (Image by the Jayasinghe family.)
A couple of months ago, we went to the Sonoran Desert Museum. The Sonoran Desert Museum is the largest outdoor museum in North America and the museum is located in Tuscon, Arizona. The full area of the museum is 97 acres. There are different trails, and along each trail you see exhibits featuring animals, plants, flowers, and more. In this way it is kind of like a zoo. There was a mountain lion exhibit, a Mexican gray wolf exhibit, a black bear exhibit, a snake exhibit, and so on. There is an aquarium called the Warden Aquarium, and a theatre called the Warden Oasis Theatre. In the theatre they hold many different shows and we saw the one called ‘Live, and (sort of) on the Loose!’ This show only takes place Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. In the Warden Aquarium, there are new touch-tanks for kids to look at, and touch. There is a bird show held outside called Raptor-Free Flight, where you get to see some different species of birds fly from tree to tree without tethers. Be sure to go to the Arizona’s Sonoran Desert Museum. You just can’t miss out!
To find out more about Arizona’s Sonoran Desert Museum, click here.
We’ve all learn’t that there are eight planets in the solar system – at least most of us. For the longest time, we thought there were nine planets. But several years ago, astronomers kicked out Pluto, and called it a dwarf planet. Since then, we’ve been learning that there are eight planets. Now, we might have to start learning that there are nine planets again – because astronomers at CalTech might have found a new planet, named Planet X.
These astronomers studied six objects in the Kuiper Belt (that’s the part of the solar system beyond Neptune) and observed that the objects were in a strange arrangement. They decided that a bigger, giant planet must be pulling on them. They thought that this planet would be the cause of the objects’ tilt, orbit, and other characteristics. And they’re probably correct.
Planet X is supposed to be the size of Neptune. It has a highly elongated orbit, taking about 15,000 years to revolve around the sun. Now, if Planet X is at the far end of it’s orbit, we most likely, will not be able to see it for a long, long, time. If Planet X is at the closer end of it’s orbit, we might be able to spot it with one of our largest telescopes, like the one in Hawaii – CELT. That would be one great discovery.
Learning about Planet Nine made me think about our visit to the Lowell Observatory, in Flagstaff, AZ. Pluto was discovered at the Lowell Observatory, in 1930, by Clyde Tombaugh. We went to the Lowell Observatory on our trip to Arizona, and it was pretty cool! We saw the Clark Refracting Telescope, and the Pluto telescope. And yes, you guessed it, the Pluto telescope was the telescope used to find Pluto. The Lowell Observatory was established in 1894, and became a National Historic Landmark in 1965. It receives 85,000 visitors per year – Wow! Most of them look at the telescopes, some watch shows and presentations, and still others take walks along the trails.
By Simran JayasingheAll packed and ready to head home (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
The last day of our trip! We were heading back home! The plan was to drive from Phoenix to our home in San Diego without making any stops, about a six to eight hour drive. We helped our parents pack the van and made sure that we had not left anything in the hotel room. We were sad to leave but were happy to be coming back home.
We drove on Interstate 10 West, along the way, we stopped at Quartzite to get gas. We stopped at the same gas station we had stopped, 11 days ago, when we were starting our trip! When we got to Palm Springs, we stopped at the Cabazon Outlet shops to stretch our legs, and to see if there were any after Christmas sales still going on. We found some really nice rain jackets at reasonable prices at the Columbia outlet store. After having some lunch at the food court, we headed back on the road. We cut across from Interstate 10 to Interstate 15 (South) by taking state Route 79. It was a long drive, and we got to our house at about 6:00 in the evening. We were all very tired, but it was great to be back home after a most enjoyable vacation.
We are almost at the end of our trip! This was the last day of our stay at the resort and we were going to head back home the next day. We had been on the road for eleven days, but we were looking forward to seeing our cute dog Rocky again, who had been boarded all this time!
Mom and our grandma decided to treat themselves, and went to the spa to get a pedicure, and something called a facial. My sisters and I convinced our dad to go to the pool, even though it was not all that warm of a day. We went to the river ranch and played in the main pool. The pool has a water fall, and we sat under it, and also played marco-polo, a pool game. We also found a volleyball, and tried to play some pool volleyball. We were not very good at getting the ball over the net.
Where is this ball going! (Image by the Jayasinghe family).Just missed it! (Image by the Jayasinghe family).I am ready, I will hit it this time (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
We played until our mom came back from the spa. Then we went back to the room and got dressed to play tennis. The hotel room includes a complimentary hour of tennis. The day before we had booked a court for an hour. We were excited to play because we had never played tennis before. At first, my sisters and I kept missing the ball, but our mother ,and father who had played tennis when they were children, showed us how. Slowly, we got the hang of it, and towards the end, we got the ball over the net. We really enjoyed it! We played tennis for an hour. It turned out to be quite a warm day, and all that running around made us thirsty, so our mom and dad ordered three piña colada drinks. We sat and drank them by the pool, and were they yummy!
Biltmore mall Phoenix (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
We went back to the room to relax and played Rummikub, Blokus, Chess, and cards. After we had relaxed a bit we decided to go explore a mall in Phoenix. We drove to the Biltmore Fashion Park. The Biltmore (mall), is a outdoor upscale mall, and we saw several stores that we hadn’t seen in a mall before. We walked around the mall for a little while, window shopping. Then, my sisters and I got very hungry and we looked for a place to eat, but nothing caught our fancy. Finally, we decided to leave the Biltmore and go to Olive Garden.
Olive Garden, One of our favorite places to eat (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
Our whole family loves the Olive Garden restaurant. We love the breadsticks, and our parents love the Fagioli soup. Kiran, Svara, and I had the cheese ravioli from the kids menu. Our grandma, got the soup and salad combination. Our mom got the Chicken Scampi. Our father got the Braised Beef and Tortellini, and our grandpa got the Garlic Rosemary Chicken Breast that comes with mashed potatoes and spinach. For dessert, we had what is the best part of Olive Garden for us. This wonderful desert is called a dolcini. At Olive Garden, there are different flavors. Our mom and dad always get the tiramisu dolcini, but Kiran, Svara, and I just pick randomly. We really enjoyed the meal, and went back to our room with full stomachs!
By Kiran JayasingheMiniature golf (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
After sleeping in until 10:30 (pretty late, huh?), we walked to the River Ranch again. Only, this time, we were going to play miniature golf. Well, really, we were going to play tennis, but every single court was booked up, so we decided to play miniature golf instead. There were eighteen holes. To get through all eighteen, took us about TWO HOURS! Can you believe it? We tried to get our dad to play another round but we had no luck.
The three golfers (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
We went back to our hotel room, had some lunch and settled in for some board games. We played “Blokus” and chess, in which I won. The my sisters and I, also made-up a game using chess pieces, which we called “kingdoms”. We had fun coming up with the rules for this game and playing a few rounds.
In the hotel lobby area (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
After our games we took a stroll around the resort. We hadn’t explored the hotel yet. We walked past a couple of pools they have for each of the buildings in the resort, looked into Rico’s American Grill (a restaurant on the premises), and bought hot chocolate in the main lobby building. After we went back to our room our grandparents decided to take us out for dinner to celebrate our birthdays. Mom looked on the internet for interesting places to eat, and we finally settled on Aunt Chilada’s. Aunt Chilada’s has a rich history. The land that the restaurant is on has had some sort of business for over a hundred years! It used to be a place where miners working in the mercury mines and smelters stayed. Before that there used to be a general store. To learn more about the restaurant’s history, check out Aunt Chilada’s website.
Aunt Chilada’s Restaurant (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
We, the kids, ordered cheese quesadillas, our mom and grandparents had burritos, and our dad had some kind of very messy, and very spicy dish, called the Jalapeño Steak Fajita (fa-hee-ta). It had a bunch of Jalapeños. I don’t know how he ate it! He said it was very good. I also tried the shrimp tacos, which can only be described by one word: scrumptious! Then we drove sleepily back to the resort. We took a warm shower, put our pajamas on, and collapsed into bed.
The Watsons go to Birmingham is a book about a family named the Watsons and their trip to Birmingham. Their neighbors in Flint, Michigan call them the Weird Watsons, because many things that they do seem weird and mysterious to their neighbors. The Watson family consists of Kenny, who is the person telling the story, Byron, and Joetta. Byron is Kenny’s older brother and is thirteen. Byron is an ‘official juvenile delinquent’ according to Kenny, and Kenny is bullied by Byron and his friends. Joetta, who’s nickname is Joey, is Kenny’s younger sister. Joetta strongly supports Byron and even tries to stop their mother from disciplining Byron when he is caught playing with matches. The family owns one brown car which they call the Brown Bomber. The family travels to Birmingham in this car to see their Grandma Sands. They hope that Grandma Sands will help Byron calm down a little bit. They go to Birmingham in the summer. When in Birmingham, scary things happen that do indeed calm Byron down. To learn more about these scary happenings, read the book!
The cold can be ignored when having tons of fun. That’s exactly what we did at Disney’s California Adventure a few months ago. As cold as it was, it didn’t matter to us if we had our jackets on or not! Disney’s California Adventure was simply too entertaining! After we parked in the Mickey and Friends Parking Structure at 7:00 A.M., we took two escalators down to the tram, which took us to Downtown Disney.
