Thanksgiving Week

We were originally going to go to California the week of Thanksgiving to visit family and of course go to Disneyland. For many reasons we decided to hold off on that trip. Because the kids were disappointed (and frankly, I was too) we came up with another fun plan...The Great Wolf Lodge.

If you've never heard of this place you might be wondering why. It is a GRAND hotel catered to family and fun. A great way to get out of the rain and fog and cold...and swim indoors at this huge water park. Below is a picture of their two biggest slides that snaked outside, the Tornado (red and yellow) and Canyon River Ride.

Here's a picture of it at night...

The scariest ride is the Tornado, which has a huge drop (and when I say drop, I mean everything ripped out from under you, free falling kind of drop) through a hole where you are forced back and forth through the big funnel pictured below.

The Canyon River ride allows the whole family to ride down together, which we rode a few times. Our kids are whimps when it comes to rides though. Well...maybe not Lauren.

The water park featured this HUGE bucket that would dump huge amounts of water every 2 minutes or so.

Here's Kenny getting drenched.

They also had a wave pool.

This was by far the funnest for the kids.

Besides the big slides (all four of them), they had two smaller slides that the kids could go on without tubes. This was more their style...yawn.

The water park completely wore them out!

Another huge hit was the Magi-Quest game. You purchase a wand that activates treasure chests, picture frames, gems, and screens over a good portion of the hotel. There were about 5 trees (pictured below) set up where you could wave your wand and select new quests, see your status and choose adventures. Then it would give you clues to help in your search.

Once you finished all ten quests you could play the advenures. Kenny is fighting the dragon here.

They also had Story Time every night. Lauren loved this part but Kenny and Carley were too old to appreciate it. They had an arcade too but we were too busy to visit it.

I should mention that this place is only 1 1/2 hours away. We would gladly take anyone to the Great Wold Lodge who wants to come visit us. The kids are already planning out their next trip to this place. We got home around noon on Thanksgiving day. Just enough time to cook our own little Thanksgiving feast. Not much is needed for a family of 5.

We had fun through the rest of the holiday playing Wii, shopping and decorating for Christmas. Here Lauren and Carley are playing tennis on Wii sport.

Kenny at bat.

Of course we had to play Rock Band as well.