"Come on kids, let's go on an Adventure!" exciting words :) Every now and then I will pack up the kids and off we go, spontaneously and randomly. They love it. This was the biggest 'adventure' we've done to date. I had been kicking around the idea of going somewhere for an overnight on the long weekend for a few days. I mentioned to my mom that I might see if there were any available rooms in
Riding Mountain National Park. I've always wanted to go. She seemed interested in coming as well. Saturday morning she called and pointed out that it was pretty grey out and rain was predicted. I was fairly tired from having stayed up WAY too late on Skype with a buddy. I had not told the kids anything specific, although Josh knew we were possibly doing 'something'. I paused.
Then I decided to just call and see if I could find a room. The girl who answered at the first place I called,
Clear Lake Lodge, said in a surprised voice "yes we do have one room available"
:)
And so it was to be. We packed up overnight bags, I LEFT (brace yourself, this is shocking!) the dishes in the sink and we headed off. Ok, it might not have been quite that efficient, but we did do those things. We stopped at Safeway and I grabbed a bunch of picnic type food, we gassed up and then we were off. As soon as I said we were going on an overnight adventure, Emily wanted to know where we were going, but when I asked Josh if he wanted to know, he said "no". That about sums up the difference between my two children ;)
I wanted to play Willie Nelson's "on the road again", as that is the song that always runs through my brain when heading out on a road trip, thanks to the countless road trips of my youth and my parent's habit of popping that TAPE (heck I remember when they played 8 tracks! ahhhh) in at the outset each and every time. We would be singing the chorus before we reach the end of our street! Alas, I do not have that particular song on CD, something to work on before the next road trip adventure. After almost 3 hours of driving, and only one pit stop (at a CO-OP that is NOT Red River CO-OP sheesh), we arrived at the gates of Riding Mountain National Park. We found our Lodge, checked in, got the grand tour and decided to head out for a walk about town. It was very windy, and we even got a little bit sprinkled on at the end of the stroll, but what an incredibly cute little place! We walked out to end of the pier, saw two bride and groom pairs being photographed, observed several people fishing off the end of the pier and unfortunately stumbled across a dead pelican on the beach. We found the Visitor Center, which was really good as I picked up the Xplore booklet, which lead to all sorts of fun the following day.
