winter safari

A little while ago, a friend from Cori's work - who is also a BYU MBA alum- mentioned that he and his wife wanted to take their kids to the Wisconsin Dells, and wouldn't we like to go with them. The Wisconsin Dells! We were in. This is a family vacation spot that has it completely figured out. It is a magical chunk of WI that has nothing but fun hotels, restaurants, and shopping. There is something for everyone. Cori found a deal going on at the Kalahari Resort that included a night at the hotel, two days at the indoor water park, pizza and drinks for four, and an in-room movie (for under $200!). The L*s were a great family to vacation with- laid back, glad to do whatever, lovers of Famous Dave's. We were peas in a pod. It is too bad they live in Minneapolis. We could hang out more often!

One of the best things about this little trip is that we got the first real snow of the winter the day we left. So as the white stuff started sticking outside, we got to hang out in our swimmies in a safari themed resort. It made me feel a little better about the weather. Just a little.

In our room, ready to head down to the water park.

We were pretty impressed with the water park. The indoor part had a lot of things we could do with the kids, which was so great. The outdoor part had bigger slides, but was closed for obvious weather-related reasons. It wasn't crowded at all. There were no lines. Grace got to go down the same slides dozens of times. We were especially glad to see the wave simulator. Cori had tried one before in MI. He hopped right on. I had to include the picture of him wiping out into the divider net.

Yeah, I tried it to. It was actually a lot of fun. I even got up onto my knees towards the end. In the picture above, the little life guard guy was trying to explain something to me. But there was a generator blasting 50,000 gallons of water my way and threatening to take my swim bottoms at any minute. I was having a hard time paying attention.

Later that night, they opened it up for surfing. This is the L*'s oldest boy. Very brave and cool.

That night we hurried back to the room and then went for a late dinner at Famous Dave's. Haven't eaten there since we interned in AZ. So yummy. After dinner we made our in-room movie selection- Night in the Museum 2. Grant and I fell asleep pretty quickly, not to the fault of the movie. It actually looked fairly cute. Cori had some work to do and Grace stayed up with him. I woke a couple of times to the sound of them laughing.

We spent most of the next day at the water park again. Grace transformed into quite the hot dogger. She was enthusiastic on the tube rides. She was confident storming up the stairs to get to the tops of the slides she could ride down solo. After going down several times, she changed things up by going down backwards.

Grant spent a lot of the time being generally concerned. I think a lot of his fretting was due to sleep deprivation. He clung to Cori the entire day, and would separate himself only long enough to sit in a swinging coconut or slide down the back of an elephant.

We had our pizza for a late lunch and played around the arcade for a while. Then we bade the L*s farewell. Cori dropped me off at the outlet mall (Gap and Banana Republic had ALL their sweaters on sale for $20 a piece!) and then drove one block to a cheese store. He looked over his shoulder to find both kids zonkered out. So he parked and went through his work email on his blackberry while I shopped. What a man. He got to do some cheese shopping at the Swiss Colony in New Glarus later into our drive home and all was well.