Days four through six

Holy guacamole!

Day Four: Pack, drive, eat, drive, unpack, play, eat, play, sleep.
Day Five: Wake at 5 am ... serious. Wait. Eat, welcome family, play, eat, play, eat, play, sleep.
Day Six: Wake at 7:30 am!! Pack, eat, play, change clothes, drive, get caught in traffic, drive, more traffic, eat, drive, HOME!!

We took the kids to Great Wolf Lodge. What a freaking blast! We thought it would be a 5 or 6 hour drive and weren't looking forward to it, but it went really well. (Except that last hour-and-a-half.)

We arrived, checked in, changed and hit the water park right away. They have a great tide pool, several kiddie slides, a couple junior-size slides which are okay for littles, and adults, and then a big-kid/adult section. The first night we spent a lot of time in the tide pool. It was a huge swimming pool that went from 0" to 5' and every 10 minutes or so a machine would start the "tides" rolling. What fun! There were inner tubes you could ride the waves on or you could just let the waves do the carrying. Miss I preferred to let the waves carry her away or crash over her or what ever. She was hilarious! Bubba liked being in the tubes. It was a lot of fun, and totally tiring!

LK, Hubby and Boy-Cousin came down from Bremerton to play with us yesterday. It was great to have them there. Boy-cousin is very adventurous and LK frets a lot less than I do. She is also very persuasive. That, plus Hubby being Miss I's new favorite boy got her down the slides. And then she never stopped! Bubba took a lot more convincing. Finally, today, an hour before we left he tried the slides for the first time. He was glad he tried, and went down them a few more times, but he was just plain ol' wore out so it wasn't much fun for him. Miss I never seems to run out of energy! That girl is constant motion! Even now, she's having trouble sleeping.

It was awesome having another family there because we could kid swap! They got to go on some rides together and so did we. I can't remember ever going on a ride with My Honey. We aren't really adventure-park types. But it was fun to experience the big-kid rides with him. I did NOT like having to climb 6 stories of stairs to get to the top of these rides. I wished I had a waterproof camera most of the trip, but especially when I was at the top of this ridiculously high staircase. I am not a fan of heights and I really had to not think about the fact that I had climbed STEPS to get to the top of this thing and I was going to go down on an inner tube or in a raft through a freaking plastic tube. YIKES! But it was a ton of fun! Worth every step.

Today we packed, ate and then played for awhile before we left. The Lodge has a wonderful check-in/check-out policy where you can start playing in the water park before your room is ready and you can play after you check out! Theoretically, you could arrive on your check-in day at 9 am, play until check in at 3 pm, continue playing until the park closes at 9 pm, stay the night, play all the next day, even after check out at 11 am until 9 pm. If you had die-hard kids this would be very cool! So we took advantage of the check-out deal and played until 1 pm, because our kids have to go to school tomorrow :) we had a long drive home, and we were all watered out!

On the agenda for tomorrow: Finish painting the walls and pull out carpet. I am so looking forward to this project! End result? Really pretty wood floors, distressed wood floors or new carpet.

I can must say, so far, this has been a great vacation!