Day 4 (Monday)

Our initial plans called for a 10 hour drive to Sioux City, IA on Monday. We decided Sunday night that the plan was a bit too ambitious. We knew we didn't want to get on the road early as we wanted more time with the Kovacs' in the a.m. We cancelled our hotel reservations in Sioux City and decided that we would hit the road until we got tired and/or until the Stanley Cup game 2 started. We got on the road around noon and started heading east across the state. I had asked Grant and Gregg how far over the speed limit it was safe to drive as I'd never driven in a 75 mph speed limit before the trip down. Grant told me that if you get caught by a city cop the tickets are only like $25 - $30. Well... I wanted to know if he knew what he was talking about. Just as we hit Bismarck the speed limit switched from 75 to 60 and I got caught doing 81 in a 60. Yikes! Well, Grant knew what he was talking about. It was a city cop and the ticket was $28. Not too bad. The boys were funny when I pulled over. They were like "are we getting a ticket?" "What happened?"

We continued on to Fargo (four hours) and then headed south. We decided that we would pick a city a couple of hours down the road and get a hotel. We called Aunt Courtney and asked her to look up Watertown, SD for us and see if there were any decent hotels near the highway, etc. She came back with a Holiday Inn Express that had a water park, breakfast buffet and family suite - perfect!! We are definitely fans of family suites - they are worth the extra bucks to have a little extra room when you have little ones that go to bed earlier than us.

About 20 minutes before we hit Watertown, this is what the back of the van looked like:

Reid woke up immediately when we got to the hotel but Ryan took a while to get awake. Once we got in our room we got on our swimsuits and ordered pizza. The pizza took over an HOUR to get there but the boys hung out in their room (living room with sleeper sofa) watching tv.

After we ate our pizza we headed over to the pool/water park. We were the ONLY people there!!!

This is the cool slide that they had:

This is the kiddie pool/play area that was there:

Ryan was running around having a great time:

Reid was having fun too:

Russ passed up a period or two of the hockey game to play at the water park for us (Awesome Dad Award!!) Here Reid and Russ are doing the teeter totter and Ryan is just sitting on the pole in the middle:

There were 34 steps to the top of the two story water slide - Reid and I counted them. Reid went down it by himself (I was very shocked). The slide was fast enough that Reid actually went under water at the end for a couple of seconds and had to swim a bit to stand up on his own. He did it and then he could reach in the pool. Russ took Ryan up to go down and he started to back out so I went up there and let him ride down on my lap. He liked that and didn't go under the water at the bottom when I took him. For the next hour Russ and I alternated taking Ryan down and going by ourselves. It was actually a ton of fun. We spent about an hour and a half swimming and then went back to the room for baths and bed.