lucky weekend

M & S had Fri. off so we packed up & went for a long weekend at Angostura Reservoir near Hot Springs, SD.  I wanted to get out of town to celebrate my birthday and had made reservations months ago thinking like a southern Californian, that Easter weekend it would be packed. Well as we loaded up the rain began and by the time we got there it was snowing. I luckily had reserved a heated sleeping cabin. It would have been nicer if the cabin had a bathroom & kitchen, but we had a grand time anyway. It was cold and windy outside, but we did have the entire campground to ourselves.

Lucky for me, M cooked the hot meals out on the freezing cold porch. In our rush to leave, we didn’t pack tinsels; luckily M had a couple of “sporks" in his truck.

Luckily several of the things I wanted to see in the area were indoors.  Friday morning we went to the Mammoth Site; a paleontology dig where they have unearthed over 50 Colombian and Wooly Mammoth skeletons. It was great, but I’m kind of a geek when it comes to stuff like that. S wants to be a paleontologist so she loved it too. We thought the replica of a primitive Siberian home built from mammoth bones was the coolest!

In the afternoon we went to Evan’s Plunge. It’s an indoor swimming pool with fresh water from one of the warm springs for which the town is named. There were 1 foot, 3 feet & 4-5 feet deep pools, water volleyball, water basketball and 2 water slides.

We surprised ourselves by staying for 4 hours. We were SOOO wrinkly.

J couldn’t get enough of this whale sculpture with water spouting out of its blow hole in the 1 foot pool.

S was pretty timid at first. M wanted to take her on the slide, but she’d barely could bring herself to go down the little kiddie slide. After a lot of encouragement & M promising to hold her up at the end so she wouldn’t go under water & she finally agreed to give it a try. As they were getting on she told M that she wanted “to go as slow as a turtle.” She loved it! They went easily another 30+ times! Though she never wanted to go alone, when we said it was time to go she wanted to do it one last time and she wanted “to go as crazy as you can, Daddy, without flying off of the sides!”

I thought it was nice to be in warmish water and not have chlorine overwhelming you. Also the bottom of the 4-5 pool was loose smooth 1 inch-ish rocks. It felt really cool and I’ll bet was great for your reflexology.
Back at the cabin that evening we made s'mores and curled up together and watched some cartoons on the laptop. It was a really fun day.

It looked like it was going to clear up and be dry and a bit warmer on Saturday. M took the canoe out on the lake to fish early in the morning, but didn’t catch anything. During breakfast another storm started brewing so we canned the playing on the beach and canoeing that was planned for the day and headed home early.

This morning there were Easter baskets and eggs hidden in the yard.

I kept up my tradition of staying up WAAAAAAAAAAY too late the night before making an Easter dress for S. (Actually I just did simple modest makeovers on a couple of deals I found on clearance, but more on that later.) She broke with tradition by actually agreeing to wear it today! It may have helped that there was a matching dress for her beloved Billy Bunny.   Here we are in our coordinating Easter ensembles.

I chose orange rolls for my birthday cake/breakfast, there was a wild moment when a couple of the sparkler candles converged to make a blazing flame in the middle of the rolls, luckily no one was injured. :) The rest of the day has been listening to conference, giggling over the Veggie Tales that were in the Easter baskets, some napping, and feeling lucky to be in our cozy house all together.