Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Vacation - Deer Ranch, The Beach, and The Water Park

After a busy day on Monday, we decided to lay low on Tuesday.  We all slept in until 9:00 so we "jumped" out of bed and headed to breakfast before it was gone :-)  (Don't you love "free" breakfast at the hotel?).  After breakfast and getting all of us ready, we headed out at about 11:00 to cross the bridge.  Josh was enthralled.  In his words, "I love that bridge".  He talked about it all week and made up a song about it too. 

 Our first stop over the bridge was Deer Ranch.  This is a place that I've passed for years driving back and forth across the U.P. I'm sure I went there at some point or another but we wanted to take the boys to see the deer.  They even were able to feed them (and even got the courage to do so after about 20 minutes!)

 My "deer" boys :-) Josh and Nate love these face signs.
 There were quite a few babies too - they were super cute.
 Darryl and I thought we would drive down to a really cool bridge and take the boys down the steps to the water but we decided to just pull off along the side of the road and enjoy the beach.  One of the great things about the Upper Peninsula is that there IS just miles of Lake Michigan shoreline where you can just pull off the road and swim.  The boys were thrilled and, since the beach was empty, it was like our own little piece of paradise. 



 Footprints - Darryl, Nate and Josh.

 The boys found all of the sticks and planted their flower garden with them.  They had a blast.  We finally pulled ourselves away from the beach and headed to a fantastic place for lunch where we got the best fish ever.  From there, we went back to the hotel for the sole purpose of getting on our bathing suits and heading to the indoor water park.  Talk about a perfect way to spend about 3 hours.  It was the perfect size for our kids and they loved it - we even managed to get both boys to go down the water slides by themselves after we had gone down with them many times.  I didn't take any photos at the water park .  .too much water dumping all over!! 

One of the fun souvenirs the boys each picked out were these giant slinkies.  Darryl taught them how to walk them down the stairs at the hotel.  This activity kept them busy for quite awhile and then, we had to do it every single day :-)

We ended our busy day by ordering some sandwiches and pancakes (for the boys) and bought them back to the room to enjoy.  Once again the boys got to play and go to bed late.  They played "workers" on the bridge since we had seen the orange barrells set up and the workers working on painting sections of the bridge.  Plus they played going on the boat to the Island.  I think they are enjoying their vacation!!!