the "Gobble-Gobble" special

We spent Thanksgiving on the shores of Lake Michigan this year. For those of you who may not be aware, Wisconsin is the water park capital of the world. Many of those parks are indoor. Perhaps that is implied when "Wisconsin" and "water park" are in the same sentence. We hadn't been to an indoor water park before and decided that Thanksgiving would be a great time to experience such a novelty. The Blue Harbor resort in Sheboygan (I only include that detail because it's such a fun word to say) offered a "gobble-gobble" special which included a two-night stay, breakfast, and the Thanksgiving buffet, not to mention free admission to the park. We totally jumped on it and the next thing we knew, there we were. This was the view from our room on Thanksgiving morning. We swam the night before and noticed that it was snowing, but it didn't really register because that park was very well heated and we were too busy playing to care about the first snow of the season. It looks terribly cold, and it was, but if you look hard enough at the water, you'll see a few surfers out there. Lake Michigan doesn't get big waves very often, so we figure that there must be a few die-hards out there who keep their dry suits handy until the lake freezes. The waves were great...if you've never seen the Pacific. We mostly felt sorry for the surfers on our way to the lazy river.
The whole weekend was wonderful, but dinner was a little lacking. There was nothing funny about it: no congealed gravy or instant mashed potatoes or anything like that. It was just a little too boring for us. And they ran out of pie. No matter how unsatisfying dinner was, none of us could do a Thanksgiving brownie for dessert. So we went back to our room and heated the cup-o'noodles and talked about our blessings over noodles in styrofoam, fruit snacks, and mint Oreos. Then we put our swimsuits back on and headed down the hall for more watery action.
The park had four water slides: two that involved tubes, and two that were just regular. They were all small enough and mild enough that the girls could do them by themselves (except the part where the tube gets to the top of the slide; that required parental assistance). Lizzie and Anna were free to go wherever they wanted and we could always find them by the ear-splitting screams they emitted whenever they went down a slide. By the end of Thanksgiving day, Anna said, "Dad, my throat hurts and I don't know why." He couldn't bring himself to tell her.

I enjoyed the slides, but my favorite part of any water park is the lazy river. To sit in a tube and move around without exerting any effort is simply glorious. Sadly, no one else loved it as much as I did. Daisy wanted to spend all her time on the little slides or in the hot tub. I'm sure she thought it was just a giant tub because she kept trying to take off her swimsuit and looking at all the other people as if they were invading her space.

On the last day there, we finally ventured outside for the first time in three days. That first blast of winter air is shocking every year, but especially so this year. We were all very quiet as Kelly led us along the walking path. He thought he wanted to get to the lighthouse in the background of the picture below. The rest of us convinced him that he did not want to walk to the lighthouse; in fact, he did not want to walk much at all. If Lizzie and I look a little blue in the picture, that's because we probably were. When the air here gets cold, it really almost looks blue all the time. I think it's either a meteorological phenomena, or our eyes freeze quickly and can't see warm colors.


All in all, we agreed that this is a vacation we would do again. We would like to see the place in the summer, or maybe early fall when it's still warm enough to go outside.

Happy Holidays!