We've been busy

Forgive me reader, it’s been over three weeks since my last blog. It took a former co-worker calling me a slacker to rouse me from my slump and put fingers to keyboard, but it’s not that I haven’t been busy – since seeing the minor league baseball game in Peoria, IL (my last blog subject) we’ve been through seven states (and slept in Wal-Mart parking lots in four of them), visited eight National Parks or Monuments, stayed in five friends houses (and seven different campgrounds), traveled over 3,000 miles (over 5,000 since starting out in August) and been to three indoor water parks.

Water Parks? I’m not sure if it’s a Midwest thing; if I just missed the growth of US water parks during our six years in London; or if, as Wendy suggests, they’ve always been here but I wasn’t paying attention because our kids weren’t water park age. But, there are a lot of water parks in the Midwest. And, we’ve learned that when your kids are national park’d out, and the outdoor swimming pools at the KOA are closed, then whizzing down a ten story-high slide on an inner tube is a welcome diversion.

When Wendy and I had planned this trip, we spent most of our time thinking of all the wonderful hikes we’d be doing in National Parks, the scenic vistas we’d be appreciating, the historical sites and museums we’d be visiting. We kind of forgot that our 7- and 12-year old boys would be a little more chuffed by mini golf and water slides. After a mini-rebellion when we were leaving Jewel Cave National Monument it was agreed that we’d do more “fun” things with the kids. We found a campground with a mini-golf course (crazy golf for those without an American English->British English dictionary) and realized that when the kids are having fun we’re all having a better time. The next day, after rushing through Mt. Rushmore, we made it to the highlight of South Dakota (for the kids) – Watiki World water park. For three hours on an uncrowded Friday night, we splashed around and rode numerous slides (all of our favorite was the “super bowl” in which you slide down a slide, get shot around a large bowl which you circle three or four times before dropping down another shoot into the pool below). Watiki World, like all the parks we’ve been to, had a “lazy river” for drifting around on a tube, a combination of slides that you can go down in a tube as well as body slides, a few different kids play areas where large buckets of water pour down every once in awhile, a hot tub/whirlpool, and an attached arcade and bar (so far we’ve not visited either of those).

After Rapid City & Watiki World, we headed east across South Dakota, stopping in the Badlands and staying over at the home of Wendy’s college roommate. We also made the mistake of stopping at a bar & grill in Belvedere, SD (the “Population 44” sign should have been our first indication that only ping food would be served). We spent a night in Iowa at a state park on beautiful Spirit Lake (even more beautiful without all the summer tourists) and then headed up to St. Paul/Minneapolis where we spent a week with another of Wendy’s former roommates.

While in the twin cities we went to our second water park, the Water Park of America which is next to the Mall of America. As much as I wanted to visit the mall, which claims more annual visitors than all of the National Parks combined (and if that isn’t a damning indictment of American society, I don’t know what is), the lazy river was calling and Josh and Simon already had their swim suits on. The WPA (Water Park of America for those of you who don’t remember the Depression) was just as fun as Watiki World; it had a “family raft” slide that up to 6 people could go down at a time, it had a 7-story high body slide and numerous other slides, it even had a surfing simulator (it’s hard to describe, but you’re essentially surfing down a waterfall with the water going up, so the water pushes you up while gravity pushes you down, keeping you in one place)! Forget the Baaken museum (an interesting museum dedicated to the way electricity can be used for health purposes, endowed by the inventor of the first implantable pacemaker), Minihaha Falls and the parties thrown by various friends – the hands down favorite event of our Twin Cities visit was the water park.

Yesterday, we left the Twin Cities en route to Northern Canada for our Polar Bear tour in Churchill, Canada. About two hours outside Minneapolis we stopped to have our photo taken next to the 30’ high plaster Viking, named Ole, in the town of Alexandria, home of the Rune Stone museum which houses the famous Kensington Rune stone. For those not of Scandinavian descent, the Kensington stone was found in 1898 by a Minnesota farmer and purports to chronicle the adventures of a couple of Vikings who visited the area in the 14th century (more than a hundred years before Columbus ‘discovered’ America). There’s been more than enough written about whether or not this was an elaborate hoax or not, so I won’t weigh in other than to say anything that gives a bunch of Scandinavian immigrants the incentive to erect a 30’ high plaster Viking in their town square can’t be all that bad.

After the Alexandria stop we headed into North Dakota and stopped for the night in the town of Grand Forks. It was 7pm and we hadn’t had any exercise all day. We thought of finding a swimming pool so I called the local YMCA but found out they didn’t have open swim on Tuesday nights. Then I had a brainstorm – “we’re still in the Midwest, why not look for a water park?” I plugged ‘water park’ into my Blackberry’s Google Maps application and it turns out we were only 1.5 miles from “Splashers of the Seven Seas.” Clearly, it was meant to be. And, because it was Tuesday night, we had the whole water park mostly to ourselves (entirely to ourselves after 8:30, not counting the 5 life guards on duty). Splashers was the perfect antidote to a day spent cooped-up in the RV. We all enjoyed the “Turbo slide,” a smaller version of the “Super Bowl,” the giant-sized hot tub, and the swimming pool area with all the basketball hoops. Wendy and I tried to get some exercise by walking the wrong way up the lazy river, only to be upbraided by a teenage lifeguard for not being in an inner tube. “But we’re the only people here,” I protested, to no avail. In the end, Wendy decided that we could justify our water park habit by claiming it was exercise. “It’s like skiing in reverse,” she explained on the phone to her mom, “you get the exercise when you’re walking up the stairs, before taking the slide down”.

In any event, that’s the update from the road. I’m writing this from a Timothy’s World Coffee café, with free Wifi, in Winnipeg. So far we’ve been to the zoo (I’m hoping one of the kids will do a Blog on why we went to the zoo, for the statue of Lieutenant Coleburn and his bear) and are planning on spending the night just outside the city. Tomorrow we head further north (400 miles), to the town of Thompson, which is close to where the roads end. From there, on Friday evening, we board a 16-hour, overnight train up to the town of Churchill. On Sunday, we’ve booked a dog sled tour in Churchill and on Monday we’ll be on the Tundra Buggy to view the Polar Bears. So, given all the good fodder for writing I’m hoping that I’ll be blogging more frequently in the future, but it’s unlikely we’ll be able to visit a water park in the next week.

Ciao!

PS – In addition to catching up on the blogging, I’ve also caught up (at least through South Dakota) on our Photos. They are now online at Flickr and you can click on this link to go there as well as the Photo link on the top of the http://www.familyadventureyear.com/ home page.