Quality Family Time...in a Parking Lot

The last time the kids and I rode with my mom down to her place in Central FL, we decided to meet-up with my little sis for the day at Disney World.

The kids had a great time, even though it was pretty crowded, and my sister and I got a chance to catch up while Granny spoiled the grandkids. Bella and Marshall watched the light parade thanks to their super-nice parents holding them up above the crowd (I must note that little kids' weight seems to multiply exponentially while holding them up this way!) and after the fireworks, we said goodbye to Aunt Chrissy and mom, me and the kiddos went to do one last ride before we too, headed out before the second parade of the night started, in order to beat the crowds to our car.

We did manage to get out of the park just before of the start of the second parade (it had to be a pretty funny site, Mom and I trying not to run as we noticed the Main Street lights go off and heard the parade music starting. I was thinking of the bible story about Lot's wife the whole way as I was repeating under might breath "Don't look back, don't look back" and hoping against hope the kids would not turn around to realize what was going was starting right behind us). Luck was on our side (or so we thought) and we made it out of the park with the kiddos none the wiser as far as that second parade was concerned.

We quickly got on the ferry and made our way back to the Ticket and Transportation Center to catch a tram (no lines b/c everyone was still watching the parade) back to our car.

As we get to the car, it's well after 11pm and we are really tired; even Marshall was asking for milk (which at this time of the night is code for "I want to go to bed"). And that's when things got really interesting. My mom caouldn't find her keys. My mom, the queen of great organizing ideas and neat little organizing gadgets, who always has her keys hooked on a carabiner (sp?) on her purse strap, can't find her keys. Turns out, she had taken them off the strap to move them to "safety" insider her purse - to make sure she didn't loose them. We guessed they must have fallen out at some point during the day. Now what?!?!?

So, off I go to find help. A ride on the tram to find a Disney Security officer led us to Disney Security manager who galantly offered to drive to the Lost and Found at the Magic Kingdom to retrieve the missing keys for us (instead of making us go through all the trams, boats, etc it takes to get back to Magic Kingdom). To keep entertained, Granny and Marsahll rode on the tram until the tram service shut down for the night (at this point it was well past midnight) and then we huddled in the empty parking lot to wait for our night-in-shining-uniform to arrive with the keys. When she did, we hugged her, thanked her and prompty headed home.

Working Out The Bugs...On Us!

The Great Wolf Lodge is a brand new hotel. When we were there, it had only been open a couple of months, so they were still working out some of the bugs. And, because we seem to be a magnet for this kind of experience, they worked out some of those bugs on us! Here is the story.

We flew into Dallas a couple of nights before the actual reunion so we could spend a day with William's Grandpa who lives in the area. To make things easier on ourselves (less moving around with the kids) we just decided to book two extra nights at The Great Wolf Lodge and day trip to Grandpa's house from there. So, on the day everyone else was supposed to arrive for the reunion, we got up early and took the kids to the water park for a while. They had a blast all morning and a little after noon, we headed back to the room to eat lunch and take a nap. We dripped our way up the elevator to the third floor (note the floor number, as this will be important later) and down the hallway to our door, only to find that we were locked out.

Of course, it is at this point in the story that Marshall tells us he has to go to the potty "real bad", complete with one of those panic-stricken looks on his face. Thankfully Aunt Cleta and Uncle Joe were only a few rooms down from us (they had arrived a day or two early as well) so we rushed down to their room hoping against hope that someone would be in there and...hooray! we got lucky!

Marshall borrowed their bathroom and then a not-so-happy Mom set off to find someone to help us get into our room. Finally, I found a janitor who found a housekeeper who found a housekeeping supervisor who was able to tell us were were locked out because we were supposed to have checked out by noon.

What?!?

By this point, Mom had transitioned from not-so-happy to completely irate as I was escorted into my room to phone the front desk to sort out the mess (while, I might add, my family continued to drip in the hallway). The friendly front desk clerk let me know they had checked us out of our room and were moving us to the third floor to be closer to the other reunion Belks.

What?!?

Yes, you remember correctly, we were already on the third floor! After I gently (ok, maybe not so gently) pointed that out, they said we could stay in our room, we just needed to bring our keys down to the front desk to be re-activated. I took keys down to then find they couldn't activate our keys without our ID's - which happened to be upstairs in the safe of the room we were currently locked out of! I think the manager could sense I was crossing the line between irate and ready-to-scream and decided that maybe I could answer a few security questions to prove who I was and have the keys re-activated.

So, with my new keys in hand, I again dripped back up to our room, although this time, without any kids or gear to wrangle, I was painfully aware that I was walking all over a really nice hotel barefoot and in nothing but a swimsuit.

Did I learn anything from this experience? Yes. I really need to get a swimsuit cover-up! :)

Vacation Part 3: The Great Wolf Lodge

The last part of our vacation was the Belk Family Reunion at The Great Wolf Lodge in Grapevine, TX. The Lodge is actually a hunting lodge themed hotel that has a big indoor/outdoor water park in the middle of it. We had great weather for water parking - sunny and low humidity, yay! Its a great concept, you can walk to the water park and easily come back to the room (complete with fridge and microwave) for lunch and naps, and they have lots of shops and restaurants, all keeping with the lodge theme - kind of like Disney World, but without the need for buses to take you from place to place.

They also have something called Magi Quest (I hope I am getting this right) for the kids to play throughout the hotel. It was kind of like a hi-tech scavenger hunt. You can buy a Harry Potter type wand and then you go on "quests" to find things (treasure chests, crystals, etc.) placed all over the hotel. When you would wave your wand at the items, they would light up and say things like "You have found the Red Crystal". The kiddos absolutely loved this! Everywhere you went, kids were waving wands at paintings and statues. And even more funny, was that if you had already found an item and tried to "find" it again, instead of "You have found the Red Crystal" you would get something like, "Don't you have anything better to do than to stand around all day waving that wand?"

All in all, it was a really fun place to vacation. Addison Marshall is already asking when we can go back and walks around singing their theme song (it was playing outside the entrance so everytime you went through the entrance you had to, I mean had the opportunity to, hear it. :)