Our weekend water park get away was great.
The drive into Idaho took me into new territory – I’d never been past Spokane. The hills and Coeur d’Alene lake were really beautiful.
Since I started the weekend on the verge of a nervous breakdown, we got on the road about 1pm after a nice and slow morning and arrived around 4pm. Silver Mountain is everything a ski resort should be – fireplaces, dark wood trims, picturesque setting… very nice.
We checked into our room and headed to the indoor water park where we met up with the other two families. The water park was a huge hit for AJ who would have kept going down the waterslides all night if I had left her in there!
The water slides were really great and I even went down the family tube “Moose Sluice” a couple times. Turns out a water slide is really a lot like an amusement ride – a couple of turns is about the max for this mom!
AJ loved every attraction and even mastered the very cool Flow Rider surf wave. 
We went back Saturday morning and spent another few hours playing in the water and hanging out with our friends.
I had not slept well so I cancelled our room for the second night and the hotel comped us two gondola ride tickets! Very nice! So we took a ride in North America’s longest gondola – almost 20 minutes to get to the top of the mountain. Unfortunately for us a blizzard blew in that afternoon and it was almost whiteout conditions at the top of the mountain (being blown around in a gondola – very fun!). But we had fun eating lunch in the lodge before heading back down.
Even though we only stayed 1 day at Silver Mountain, we had planned to be gone the whole weekend. So I decided to head back to Hayden, ID and go to Raptor Reef water park the next day.
The 45 minute trip between Kellogg and Hayden was some of the worst winter driving I’ve ever had to do. The blizzard at the top of the gondola ride – ran into that driving out of town. Hit the pass in the 4th of July rec area and was all-of-a-sudden driving on ice that quickly became ice with water running over it. It was bumper to bumper traffic going 2 miles an hour past sliding semi’s, flares and ID State Troopers. I was sooooo thankful to reach the hotel!
The next day was the water park at Triple Play – Raptor Reef. It had this amazing water slide that swirled you around in a vortex before sending you down again. I think we were about water parked out as we only lasted a few hours before hitting the road for home. I’d definitely like to go back and visit as we never got to bowl and AJ really wanted to spend hours playing the myriad of video games available.
All in all – a great weekend. And I’m no longer on the verge of a nervous breakdown! =-)
