My "Vacation"

Dan and I just returned from a little mini-vacation with the kids at the Edgewater Resort & Waterpark in Duluth. (Mid-week deal + Dan's "use it or lose it" vacation hours = "Let's drive north for a couple of hours to go swimming!") Good idea? Let's see:

The Bad:

• Waterparks that claim to have "zero-entry" around the entire perimeter of the pools for babes and small ones but in reality only have one six-foot long zero-entry spot with fountains jetting up from the ground. Not exactly a place Amelia wanted to hang out.

• Waterparks with freezing water that makes a baby cry.

• A 3yo who, though so excited about the waterpark that he could barely sleep the night before, was so petrified of the loud noises, buckets dumping water from the skies and unannounced jets of water that seemed to come from everywhere that he clung to his mom or dad like a baby chimp and wouldn't look up from our chests the entire time.

• That same 3yo getting all wigged out crazy hyper in the hotel room ultimately leading to locking himself in the bathroom with the light off by mistake (that was fun) and refusing to sleep.
• Forgetting that "you get what you pay for" and that even a mid-week deal on a lakeside room can totally suck when the building is aging and they don't seem to care since everyone just comes for the waterpark anyway.

• Forgetting that "lakeside room" doesn't mean squat if the highway is in between you and the lake. (Yes, the lake is big. You can see Lake Superior from almost anywhere in Duluth. But you can hear the highway all night long if you get the wrong hotel room...)

The Good:

• Remembering that Hell's Kitchen has a Duluth location too. Our favorite... Lunch today was so good that we had to bring home some of their homemade goodness (the PB is for Dan's office, since it's still contraband around here).
• Finally taking Jackson to the Lake Superior Railroad Museum and delightfully discovering that it's attached to the Duluth Children's Museum. This morning's museum adventures were way better than the hotel misadventures.

• Stealing away with the Baby Girl for a little bit of time at a local yarn store. Yarn Harbor was all that and then some. (Attention Yarn Diet Police: This is not an offense against the yarn diet. The articles of the 2009 Yarn Diet clearly state that travel yarn is allowed. And though Duluth is not "someplace new" by any stretch, the yarn store was new to me. I even purchased locally dyed yarn, so there!)
• Finding a new book about knitting that was just published this year and was written by a local St. Paul woman. Sold.
• Driving out to Park Point Beach just to see what it looked like in the wintertime. Neat. Really neat. The ice on Lake Superior was pushed in towards shore by the wind and waves (before totally freezing) and got all piled up like what the snow plow leaves behind. Except nature did it. Totally neat. The sand dunes on the beach were cool too.
• Two kids who slept all the way there and all the way back.

• Deciding to leave a day early since the hotel experience wasn't all that and then we'd have a full 3-day weekend together at home.

So, I think it was a good idea. We needed to escape (even for just 24 hours, to a place that's colder than where we live) and we all love Duluth (even Amelia, she just doesn't know it yet). We're all glad to be back home though. And we learned that it may be best to just hold off on waterparks and hotel visits for a while yet...