Tales of the Flowers: Chuck E Cheese Summer of Fun Pass, Hanging out with Friends - Los Angeles

After having so much fun at the Magic Mountain and the Pasadena Chalk Festival last week, now, we're down in the South Bay of Los Angeles. Theresa is working, so I've got the kids during the day and we need something to do. Luckily for us, we've got the Chuck E Cheese Summer of Fun Pass!

There's many different levels, Bronze, Silver, and Gold, and we opted for the top tier, giving us 250 game credits per day, plus 50% off food! We've been making good use of our pass so far this year, but with all this free time, I think we're going to hit it a little harder.

When we were visiting Pasadena for the Chalk Festival, we were able to go to these four different Chuck E Cheese stores over the course of a few days.

Today I've got the kids and a car and all the way until dinner time to explore.

We started our journey at what was a really good Chuck E Cheese last year. They had a Down the Clown game that I was really good at and could win lots of tickets. We stopped in and saw that like many of the Chuck E Cheese's now that they had remodeled. They've added a trampoline fun zone and taken out many of the games, including Down the Clown. We puttered around looking for other things to play, but didn't see anything we loved.

I pulled up my phone and looked to see where the next closest CEC was and the kids were happy to pile into the car and go to the next one!

The next CEC was similarly disappointing. Ian didn't like that one of his favorites, Pop the Lock, had a glitchy button. Press it once and it might register, might not, might count twice (making you lose).

We opted for pizza there and planned our next move. You kids good to try another one? Yes!

Off to the next Chuck E Cheese where we were disappointed again. Just 10 tickets for beating the high score? Some of these places are getting cheap.

And it's pretty common to see an Avengers coin pusher that is broken.

But! Here! We've found a game that is fun to play and let's you actually win a few tickets!

If you can get over 200 points (which in this game is pretty do-able), you win 60 tickets! Score 199 and you only win 8 tickets, so it's a pretty big drop. Getting over 200 points also takes 2 minutes, so it's not a very quick way to earn tickets either. Could be worse though. Ready to try another CEC?

At our final CEC they've got more fun games. Ian loves Centipede and if you can beat Mega Spider you win 100 tickets! He plays solo until he gets to the final round then calls out and Alli and I come rushing over from wherever we're playing and try to help defeat it.

We win a few times and have a bit of fun with it.

For those keeping track, that's 5 different Chuck E Cheese locations visited in just 1 day. Probably not a record, but we were pretty proud of ourselves. Some were pretty good, while others were bad.

That evening while having dinner with T, I happened to stumble on a livestream for a rocket launch. We headed outside and watched as it streaked across the California sunset.

06/17/2025

The next day was Tuesday which means that it's time for the Farmer's Market!

We took the kids here countless times when they were little. Our favorite stop is always Ken's Top Notch. We were given instructions by Theresa to buy a whole bunch of white nectarines.

Ian, since when did you have a farm?

Artichoke flowers are so pretty!

Since we're down here, why not stop by a couple more Chuck E Cheeses. We didn't have a lot of luck with this one last year, but we'll stop in just to see.

They have a working Avengers, but it appears they've modified the ticket payouts and number of shots you get. I'm used to seeing it have 1000 ticket bonus with 500, 250, 200 alternates that you can win. This is a bit less. And instead of 6 shots per swipe, you only get 3 now. Sigh. It makes the games a lot less fun to play.

Putting up a high score on basketball pro all to win... 16 tickets. Bleh. Let's go check the other one.

The next Chuck E Cheese is actually the closest to our hotel, but we remembered it being terrible last year. And this year... yeah, no change. Broken games. Low ticket payouts. No surprises.

There were some unique games for just playing, but we're after fun and tickets! We've got plans for all those tickets this year.

So, add two more CECs to the list of ones we've visited.

We took our remaining credits and drove further up the road to one of the places we liked to use the rest.

More centipede wins.

The Milk Jug toss doesn't pay out too well, but it's nice to know I can still get decent scores.

A new left-handed high score.

Whoa! 53 is a good score!

Ah, you know what. This game is glitchy, but in a good way. It's double-counting baskets. I think the bonus tickets was something like 25 so nothing amazing, but better than nothing.

06/18/2025

One thing we definitely have to do while we're here is meet old friends. Ian and Alli are both friends with Brylie (who Ian went to school with). Even when we're in Florida, they play Minecraft together and FaceTime. So it was great that we could all meet up and play together. We asked if they wanted to do a movie, or something, and they opted for playing Minecraft together in person.

So, they took over the hotel room and had unlimited gametime.

Coming out for snacks and Chick-fil-A that I picked up for everyone.

Good to see you Brylie!

And since it's Wednesday, I know where I'm headed! Hermosa Beach! Let's play some volleyball! Alysa runs the event with dozens of people showing up each week.