Remember your dragon castle?

Do you remember your Imaginext Dragon World Fortress Castle? It was among your favorite toys as a preschooler. I think you played with it just about every day.

It had this dragon head on it that could reach down and grab attacking knights with its jaws. Pressing a button also opened windows to the sound of a thunderclap so that the castle appeared to be "alive"!

We mainly used it for big battles between knights and dragons (Usually the ones we picked up at McDonalds). You also would place Disney princesses in it and have them fight off the dragons!

Our Star Wars and sueprhero action figures also had many goes at attacking/defending the castle!

'Luke, how did you get up there?'

McDonald's in Acton, Calif.

You might remember on Christmas Day I told you the story of how we always used to joke about the horse that was atop a McDonald's in Acton, Calif.

When you were 4 years old, if we drove by the McDonald's, you'd say, 'Luke, how did you get up there? Not again!' as pretending to be Sheriff Jack, one of our Old West cowboys (I always was Sheriff Jack's sidekick, "The Deputy"). Luke was Sheriff Jack's trusty horse (You even had a horse that you named Luke in your set of cowboy figures.).

Playing the Deputy, I'd suggest all kinds of crazy ways of getting Luke down, like "We could get a crane and lift him down" or "We could fly one of them newfangled air balloons over the McDonald's and lift him down" or "We could divert the river and flood the whole town so that Luke could swim down from the roof."

Anyway, here's a picture of that famous Old West-themed McDonald's with Luke the horse atop it!

Dragon Happy Meal toys

Do you remember all of your plastic dragon toys? They were picked up at McDonalds in Happy Meals, distributed during the movie "How to Train Your Dragon" in April 2010.

We had most of them - there were a couple that for whatever reason we never got - and in a few cases (especially Night Fury and R.D.) we had multiples of them! We seemed to use the dragons in quite a lot of our play. Most often they were part of our knights and castle play, but sometimes they were bad guys in our adventures with Star Wars or superhero action figures.

I thought of the dragon toys because a sequel to the movie is coming out next summer. I wonder if Mcdonalds will release another set of them for us to collect?

Remember Charlie Bown Farms?

Four years ago today, we stopped at Charlie Brown Farms in Little Rock, Calif., to look at the dinosaurs! You may recall that they had all of these statues for sale, and among them were several man-sized dinos.

Charlie Brown Farms always was a fun palce to explore because they had lots of itneresting stuff there to discover and play with. They also had mega amounts of candy and soda pop options!

It was across the road from a McDonalds that we sometimes stopped at. I almost always pulled off there on my way back to San Diego for a little dinner to eat in the car.

Here's some pictures from our adventure!

Recall our hike to Mormon Rocks?

One year ago today, we hiked Mormon Rocks in the San Bernardino National Forest. It was on the way to the I-15, that huge freeway that takes you from Las Vegas and down the mountains into Los Angeles (and part of the route we always took to San Diego). You might remember there was a McDonalds, near the freeway intersection with the road, that we often stopped at.

The Mormon Rocks looks a lot like Vasquez Rocks because they were made the same way. About two million years ago, everything west of those rock formations was an ocean with rivers bringing water and sediment (sand and rock) down from the mountains. As the sediment fell to the river and ocean floor, it hardened into rock. Since then, the collision of two tectonic plates has raised the land out of the water and tilted them into the weird angles we see today.

During the hike, you took along your toy rifle that we picked up at Disneyland a few weeks before and played cowboy. You were Sheriff Jack as usual, and we were out looking for Black Bart!

Here's a whole bunch of photos from our hike!

Some places we built some memories of

Yesterday, I saw a lot of places, probably for the last if not for a long time, where we once spent time together. The Twin Cities where you now live offer its own great sights and events, yet it was with some melancholy that these places of our past our not vanquished to memory alone.

There were the famous "Kirk Rocks," as you liked to call them, where Captain Kirk fought the famous Gorn. It's really Vasquez Rocks County Park, and we went there quite a few times (the picture at left is from April 2011), hiking the same trails Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock did, often playing our own "Star Trek" and later cowboy adventures.

Speaking of cowboys, do you remember the McDonalds in Acton that had a horse atop it? Everytime we drove past it while making up cowboy stories, we'd joke about how it was Sheriff Jack's horse, Luke, and say "Get down from there, Luke!"

And as far as McDonalds go, we stopped many times at the one in Santa Clarita next to the new Kohl's along Hwy. 14. Whenever heading into Los Angeles, it was a certain pit stop for a snack or bathroom break.

Maybe one day we'll be able to go back to all of those places again. I hope we don't have to wait so long that you will have a son of your own who we take on the trip - though I can't wait to meet my grandchild!