Amana Colonies

One of the things I love (usually) about Greg is that he is spontaneous.  I think I've mentioned before that he stretches me sometimes.  The weekend of the 12-14th we were completely open, so Greg suggested we go out to Amana colonies for Friday night/Saturday.  I called, and the Clarion hotel that has the Wasserbahn water park in it had a room for a pretty good rate.  It was only about a 2.5 hour drive, and we got there around 8:15.  The water park was open until 10:00, so we took the kids down there for a bit.  What fun it was!  They had a blast!


Our munchkins on Saturday morning

Max and Nora ready to head down to the water park!  We went right at 8:00 when it opened.

Max with the kids' area in the background

Coming down the water slide!  He wasn't a big fan of the huge bucket that filled up and dumped every 5-10 minutes.

We don't have pictures, but there were also 2 large water slides that Greg and I went down several times.  We definitely want to go back!

The hotel doesn't have a continental breakfast, but we wanted to get to the water park early....so we fed our kids Chips Ahoy for breakfast....and mid-morning snack.

After drying off and getting dressed, we headed out to the miniature golf course!  Max and Nora didn't last too long and Greg thoroughly trounced me, but it was still fun.

Max putting...

They also had a huge wooden fort to climb on with a slide.  Since I was wearing a skirt, I let Greg play with the kids while I stayed with sleeping Tirzah.

Then we left the hotel and headed to the actual Amana Colonies!

Our first stop was lunch at the Ronneburg Restaurant, which had this charming rooster in front of it.  Max, of course, wanted to ride it.

Nora, of course, wants to do whatever Max does.

After lunch we browsed through some shops and walked down to the historic part of the village.  We were in particular looking for a place that Greg remembered that had homemade root beer.  We found it at the Millstream Brewing Company.  Here Max is sampling the cream soda...

...and here is Nora sipping away at the root beer.  Both were okay, not the best soda I've ever had, but not the worst, either.

Max wanted a picture with the man holding the brewery's hours...

....so of course we got one of Nora, too.

The kids did pretty well with walking around the village (or riding in the stroller) but were very ready to get back to the van.  It was a quiet ride home for most of the way!

One last thing...I hadn't seen this before, and it made me laugh.  Part of the two-lane road we were on was under construction.  It was down to a one-lane road, with stoplights at either end.  As we waited, we saw a car with this sign on it:  PILOT CAR  FOLLOW ME.  I thought, "Surely that's not going to 'lead' us on this one lane road...." and sure enough!  Just in case we were tempted to drive on the OTHER side of the orange cones marking the construction site, we had this lovely car show us the way.  I guess my dad says he's seen it when the construction area is pretty long...but still.  Is it really necessary?  Anyway, we had a super fun time in Amana and I would love to go back!