We Survived Kendra Kaos 2007!

Our niece Kendra got to take a three week cross-country road trip with her grandparents this summer, stopping at some fun places along the way and spending one week with us in LA. (The above photo of her was taken inside Disney's Innoventions under the blacklights.) Entertaining a 10-yr-old for a week was a lot of work but HOLY MOLY did we have fun!
To commemorate her trip we made matching t-shirts for our group to wear while at California Adventure and Disneyland. This turned out to be one of the best things we did! We didn't plan it, but the bright yellow shirts made it SO much easier for us to spot each other across the park or among crowds. For the front of the shirt we used a graphic from the movie Vacation. Remember when Clark is showing the kids the trip on the computer, and Rusty goes after him with the pacman type character? Well, it technically wasn't pacman, but that's how we remembered it, and we thought it looked better that way so we made it pacman.
Dan dubbed their "Griswold-esque" adventure Kendra Kaos 2007 and had the idea to make the back of the shirt similar to a concert shirt, listing all of the places that they stopped. They started out from Detroit and stops included: St. Louis Arch, Roswell UFO Museum, Grand Canyon (they even went out onto the Skywalk!), Hoover Dam, Calico Ghost Town, California Adventure, Aquarium of the Pacific, Disneyland, Hollywood, and Natural Bridges National Monument.
While they were in LA we also hit the beach a couple of times, silkscreened a bunch of girl scout t-shirts and went to the newly renovated Griffith Park Observatory. phew! Our good friend Sean (from Social Studies Design) was kind enough to hook us up with a behind-the-scenes tour at the aquarium and it was so cool! We got to put our hands into a tank that held cleaner shrimp, and they actually crawl on your hand and clean off bits of food and dead skin cells. Kendra decided that she needs a cleaner shrimp at home as a pet so that she never has to wash her hands again! We also got to feed pieces of fish and shrimp to some rock fish by hand. (Well, you know, with tongs.) The aquarium is really an amazing operation; if you haven't been yet you should definitely go!

Still sorting through the hundreds and hundreds of photos we took and there was some video too. Next we'll start putting it together into a slide show and a DVD. You know, in our spare time. heh.