Vacation Day

We never did make it to Holiday World ... I kept having visions of zooming along the roller coasters, kleenex streaming behind us ... Rick kept having visions of trying to sleep in a hotel room with a kid who's coughing all night long ... neither were very pretty pictures.

The thing Rick most wanted to do at Holiday World was go to the water park. Which we realized could be accomplished closer to home. So we headed up to Grafton, Illionois to visit Raging Rivers. Right before we left I had the inspiration to google Raging Rivers coupons, and discovered that the Alton Visitor's Bureau had a link to a buy-one-get-one-free coupon. We still had to pay the $5 parking, but our admission price was sliced in half with a quick print-out.

We packed a picnic lunch and arrived before noon. The weather was cloudy, with a breeze coming off of the river. Overall, it felt pretty cool out for 75 degrees. But we had confidence that the sun would come out and warm us up. And by the time we left it was nearly 90 degrees.



So we headed over to the wave pool to jump waves.




And then tried out the various slides coming down the hills. Annabeth tried out the tubes first.



Thalia preferred tube-free.


The park is built into a hill next to the Mississippi River -- really a pretty setting. You can look out over the rails and see the river, the boats, the barges -- it seems like you're in a huge expanse of water.



In spite of repeated applications of suntan lotion, the kids managed to get sunburned. I think wave-jumping and tube-riding will do that -- it wears the lotion off more quickly. I'm sort of glad that we're not doing a multi-day visit to a theme park, as today would've been sort of a drag. It was nice to come home to our aloe vera plant and slather shoulders and cheeks with the juice (Annabeth was wearing a slice of the leaf around on her nose -- very goofy-looking). And I'm not sure the kids are going to wake up any time soon.