WFRV

It's a short drive to Santa Claus, only 3 ½ hours. To us now that's
nothing. I drive for the first three hours and Mike drives for the last
half hour. We stop at a Chinese/Japanese buffet that has such Asian
specialties as: buffalo wings, steamed corn on the cob, macaroni salad, and
some kind of cold mixed vegetable salad in a creamy sauce. (Perhaps my
Midwestern friends can explain that to me?)

An aside about flies: boy howdy are there a lot of flies out here. I can
only guess it's because there's so much farmland. Everywhere we've been,
nice or not, has lots of flies. They're everywhere you'd expect (the worst
is when they're buzzing around inside the toilet bowls at rest stops) and
everywhere you wouldn't (the fancy restaurant at the North Rim of the Grand
Canyon) and of course they're in every buffet restaurant we've been to.
Normally I wouldn't eat at a place that had flies and a buffet but it's
apparently inescapable around here. I do not like flies.

We arrive at Lake Rudolph fairly early in the day, around 2:30pm. Just
before we get there I'm checking on the Internet and I see that the Holiday
World/Splashin' Safari theme park is not open on Monday which it turns out
is the first day of school around here! It would have been OH-so-nice if
the campground had mentioned this when I booked the site. Why ELSE do they
think we're coming?? So we hurry over to Splashin' Safari which turns out
to be an excellent water park. We ride a bunch of slides and the lines are
very short; we do one called the Zinga three times. It's a tube ride on a
raft for four that sends you down, around a few curves, then straight down
and out into a funnel on its side; you zoom up one side, come down and zoom
up the other side, and repeat, all the while heading towards the narrow end
of the funnel, where you're dumped into a pool. Thanks to the weight we've
all gained sitting on our butts for so long, we achieve maximum velocity and
go quite high on each side, to the point where you feel like you're standing
before you slide down to the other side. You can see why we go on it three
times.

Around 6:30pm Mike wants to head over to Holiday World for a few coaster
rides; surprisingly Sam wants to go so Ben and I head back to the RV park
(there's a Red Sox/Yankees game he wants to listen to on the computer and I
don't do roller coasters, having some remaining survival instincts). Sam
goes on one wooden roller coaster twice, and Mike says it was a long ride,
about seven minutes. Then he wants to go on a coaster we'd seen from the
highest slide in the water park; it went straight up for a loooong time and
I overheard some women in line for the slide saying "it doesn't look like it
goes straight down from here, but it does". I told Sam before she went off
with Mike, "When Daddy rides the coaster alone, make sure to stay exactly
where he tells you until he gets back." She didn't comprehend which coaster
I was talking about so she went on the straight-down one. (Let me just say
she didn't eat a lot of dinner.) They return by 8:15 and we all settle down
to yet another game of Hearts. We play until someone gets to 100 and then
the person with the lowest score wins. My score is quite low and they try
to gang up on me but I persevere. Suckers!

# posted by LDW @ 9:49 AM