Category: Travel

What a weekend. Oy.

Friday Tabby went home from school with her bestie to start celebrating her bestie’s birthday early. She was gone until late in the evening, so we had a quiet evening at home with Ben – made cookies, prepped for skiing. Just before we needed to pick Tabby up, we ran a couple of errands, including a stop at Target. I glanced through the dollar bin in anticipation of Tabby’s Valentine’s class party and didn’t see much. Ben, however, fell madly in love with a small stuffed dog in the approximately 2 seconds he laid eyes on him. When we said a perfectly-normal “no” to his request to bring him home, we were treated to a 30 minute screech fest fit. This is not normal of Ben. He has mostly recovered from the temper tantrum stage and it was quite a BAD surprise.

Then Saturday… A few weeks ago we agreed to go to the mountains with a bunch of friends. It was sort of an against-our-better-judgement scenario because of all the work we still need to finish before we list our house, but we’d been working really hard and figured “What the heck?” we can take a day off. The plan was to leave Denver early Saturday, get to the slopes in plenty of time, enjoy a nice day, have a nice dinner, sleep our 8 hours and head back to town early.

Best laid plans.

We got going early – not quite as early as we’d planned, but still pretty early. Unfortunately (we found out much later) there’d been an early morning accident that had already hosed the drive. We spent over 3 hours for a 1 hour drive. The kids were well-behaved, plugged into their TVs and we only had a couple of incidents, aside from us wanting to gouge our eyes out from stop-and-go frustration.

One, unfortunately, was when my sister (who decided to join us last minute) had to help Ben pee in a cup – because there wasn’t much of a choice – didn’t go perfectly cleanly. Err …. eew. And the other right before we reached our destination and another car cut us off and we almost hit them. Luckily Matt is a very skilled crap-conditions driver and we avoided collision.

Once we got there, the day, which had supposed to have been nasty, was lovely and we had a few great hours of skiing. The kids were into it. The weather was perfect and other than some small incidents – Tabby’s pass got lost somewhere between the car and the slopes and Ben lost his ski on the first chairlift ride – it was great. We took a dip in the pool and hot tub before we went to our hotel room to get ready for dinner.

Dinner was probably the easiest time. The kids went to the Kids’ Club and the adults had a nice dinner with multiple adult beverages and perfect viewing of the playoff game. Our allotted 3 hours went really quickly and we picked the kids up right around 9. When we got back to the hotel room, I gave the kids a choice of either sleeping on the floor “camping style!!!” with my much-coveted super-soft green blanket or in the other bed with Aunt Gaga.

My normally mild-mannered 6 year old decided then and there that this was a have-her-cake-and-eat-it-too situation and she was going to have both come hell or high water! So we were treated to another colossal meltdown courtesy of the other kiddo. Making this even more fun was the fact that we were in a hotel and had nowhere else to go and I was constantly worried we were disturbing everyone in the building and our friends next door in particular.

Finally after we threatened (and MEANT IT) to go home,  she calmed down and we all went to bed and got some halfway decent sleep.

The kids were up early as usual and we knew we might have a long drive back to Denver, so we decided to head out. We’d talked about having breakfast with friends before leaving, but when Matt checked the travel advisory site right before we left, he found that things were already looking grim and we bailed on breakfast and headed home.

Grim was a sort of understatement. We had intermittent white-out conditions with blowing snow and icy roads. The only saving grace was that we never had them at the same time. It was slow, white-knuckle driving. The kids, once again plugged into their DVDs, behaved very well and there were only a few very scary moments – one complete white out when I really thought we should just turn around. But once again, a 1 hour drive took us almost three going home.

So about 6 hours of driving for about 4 hours of skiing, 3 hours of adult time and a crappy night’s sleep. Really not a great ROI.

Once we got back, we had unpacking, laundry, grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning to do which left us with no time to actually make progress on our house. It’s mostly our own fault, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating. At least the Broncos won.

Well it’s only been a month or so since we actually got back from our trip and finally I’m making the last installment of our travel log … all about Vancouver. The last day of the cruise was a sort of blur. We had to have all of our luggage out in the hall the evening before debarkation. The next morning we got up and went for our last breakfast on the ship. After that, it was the waiting game, waiting for our group … green Tinkerbells … to be called. It didn’t take TOO long and then we were off and back into the real world.

We couldn’t check into our hotel right away so Matt and I walked a few blocks and got the rental car and then we went to Granville Island, a nice little shopping district just outside mainland Vancouver. We had some eats and poked around the shops and then we went back to the hotel. Naps and pizza ordered in finished out our day. Everyone was exhausted.

The next day we headed out to Stanley Park. It is a huge park on the edge of the island, bigger, even than Central Park. We had a nice walk through the park to the aquarium and spent some time there.

They had an amazing jellyfish exhibit with tons of different jellies that we’d never seen before. They were eerily beautiful.

After lunch and some time at the playground …

we went to the sprayground and had some fun in the sun.

We spent the rest of the afternoon, driving around Vancouver and checking out this and that. We had dinner at restaurant that specializes in mac ‘n’ cheese. Pretty tasty.

The next day, we got up and headed out on the Sky Train (Vancouver mass transit) and went to British Columbia Science World. This is an AWESOME science museum for the whole family. The whole first floor was filled with great optical illusions and brain teasers that we all played with. Off the first floor, there’s other neat things to “experience” – pneumatic ball mazes, large scale spirographs, all sorts of audio play, a target practice game, etc. etc. We didn’t even get to see all of it because there’s so much.

We had lunch there and then afterward we took the train back a couple of stops to Chinatown. We checked out some of the interesting shops and bought some cheap tshirts. We finished out the day with dinner at a Chinese restaurant and packing … including taking the car back.

The next day was all about travel. We got up around  7 to head to the airport at 8. We had to check in, go through customs, find food to take on the plane and burn up some energy on the nice little playground that was right by our gate. Our plane left a little late and when we got to Dallas, the Nashville crowd had to run for their plane while we waited on the stroller and then ran it over to them. Once they were safely off, we grabbed some dinner, including a couple of GIANT margaritas at TGI Fridays.

We had a long layover, so we made good use of the free Wifi at the airport and let the kids run around in a little play area. Our plane was unfortunately delayed and so we didn’t get back into Denver until well after midnight. We had a few misteps … got back on the highway going the wrong direction and took forever to find gas, meaning we didn’t get home until after 2. Man were we all glad to see home sweet home.

So much for my resolution to get back blogging regularly again, eh? Well I’ve got a terrific excuse. We spent the last two weeks away from home – cruising to Alaska on The Disney Wonder and checking out the sites of Vancouver. We traveled with Grammy Sherrie, Aunt Theresa and “Baby” Autumn (20 mos and not so much a baby!). It was a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime sort of trip.

As with anything like this, the first day was a long day of travel. We left our house around 3 AM (MST) and didn’t get on the ship until around 3P (PST). There was a lot of hurry-up-and-wait which is always frustrating, especially with kids. There was also some sort of SNAFU with a passport and whereas we thought we could skip immigration/customs, we ended up having to go through it after all. No idea how much time that would have saved us, but anything would have been welcome because once we got on the ship, none of us had eaten in hours and were all starved, but everything was closed for the mandatory drill and we couldn’t get food until after we sat through a 30 min lecture on how to put on a lifejacket.

Irritating, but it was quickly forgotten when we could get a nice snack (tasty pizza) on deck 9.

We spent the first day (an at-sea day) exploring the ship. The sucker is huge. 11 decks (3 pools fit on one deck to give you an idea how long they are) and it’s pretty easy to get turned around at first, forgetting what you’re headed to is forward or aft. The ship was put into service in 1998 and it’s in remarkably good shape especially since it probably sees around 1000 kids per voyage.

Speaking of kids, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that lots and lots of stuff really caters to kids. After we got our kids tagged, we checked them into the club or the lab at least once a day for an hour or more. They had non-stop stuff to do at one place or the other and the kids could go back and forth as they desired. They built pasta houses and tested them ala the three little pigs. They went to Ratatouille cooking school. They became Rescue Rangers. They also played hours of Mario Kart and princess dressup. They loved it and frequently wanted to go there over doing anything else.

And when they were with us we had lots of fun too. We all spent a lot of time in the pool watching “Funnel Vision” on-deck Disney movies played over the mid-ship pool, and watching movies in the indoor Disney movie theatre (including Monsters U, Peter Pan and Wreck-It Ralph). There were lots of other great family activities – game shows, contests, karaoke, dancing, etc. that will be a bit more appropriate as the kids get older.

While the kids were busy, Matt and I did lots of the adults-only stuff the ship has to offer. We did a whiskey tasting. We spent hours relaxing in the hot tub, in our state room, in the cafes. We had dinner at the ship’s adults only restaurant, Palo, which was awesome. We even got workouts in on all of the at-sea days. There was a running track on deck 4 that went around the whole ship (about 1/3 mile) and a gym in the spa area.

Our whole family got dressed up for formal night (nod to Black and Bianco where we got Ben’s suit for $25). It was fun to get dressed up though it’s not very strictly enforced we noticed. The same night they did The Golden Mickeys for the main evening entertainment.

So the kids got to walk the red carpet and take in a “live” show. We did two of the 7 evening’s entertainments. Since they didn’t start until 8:30 it was hard after a long day to keep the kids up ’til 9:30, but they did this one and Matt also took them to Toy Story the Musical another night. They were fun for the kids but a bit tedious for the adults. They also had some magicians, a hypnotist, Monsters U in the big theatre and Disney Legends, which is another musical type show.

The entire ship experience was excellent and we had a wonderful time. I’ll share more tomorrow about our off-ship experiences.