At Our Whit's End

We went to Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It was great! There was a whole level just for kids. Isn't that great? They even have a restaurant called Whit's End. The food was awesome. I had an apple, apple juice, and nachos, and let’s be honest, everyone loves nachos. By the way, Whit's End is famous for its ice cream. (I got an ice cream sundae).

Besides the restaurant, there was a bunch of other fun stuff such as a Kids Radio show where you are the star. My family and I did a mystery called the broken clown lamp. They also had a slide that was really fun and very swirly. The place was great for hide-and-go-seek. We had a lot of fun, and we stayed for hours. Bye!

- The Daughter

Hi Dr. Dorito here, and I'm blogging about Whits End in Focus on the Family head quarters. If you haven't heard of Adventures in Odyssey you can listen to it at http://www.whitsend.org/. Whits End is a restaurant known for its ice cream. It's not just a restaurant, it's also a play place. It's not a McDonald’s play place though. It has a old plane you can explore, a Narnia wardrobe that you can go in, a recording studio where you can make your own episode. It has a puppet theater and a three story slide. Whits End is very family friendly though the adults may be a little bored downstairs. This place is very fun, but if you want to spend more than 4 hours there it might get boring (unless you like hide-and-go-seek.) This is DD signing off.

-the son

An Apple a Hotel Keeps the Doctor Away

So many things change when you don’t have a home, including punishments and rewards for the children. As a family, we spent part of the evening coming up with new rewards and punishments for grades and behaviors. Our old consequence of not being able to play with friends just didn’t seem to provide the appropriate incentive anymore…imagine that.

It was decided that for a “C” in homeschool, you would lose your turn for a restaurant pick and have no screen time for 1 day; a “D” is lose the restaurant pick and 2 days no screen time; an “F” is lose your pick and 3 days no screen time. Nose picks, burps, farts, other gas expulsions not specified, and other general rudeness, like cutting in front of someone, result in 25 jumping jacks, right there and then, even in a public place. Yes, even the Dad and myself may find ourselves doing jumping jacks in the middle of a zoo or restaurant.

As a family, we also talked about food consumption, how the trip is not a week-long vacation that we can splurge all week and get back to normal afterwards. Nor can we live on french fries and chips all year, so we came up with guidelines for meals. We decided breakfast is unlimited fruit, yogurt, and eggs, but we may eat only 2 grains (only one of which can be a desert.  ie doughnut, pastry.) The other guidelines are: one soda per day and one order of fries/onion rings/chips/cookie per day, in order to encourage more healthy eating.

To counter all the punishments, we needed a new reward for a 100% on a quiz or test. Together, we decided that the recipient earns a meal free of restrictions. I’m not a big fan of using food as a reward like that, but our options are pretty limited on the trip. If you have suggestions for other rewards or punishments, please share them with us! We’d love to hear them.

-The Mom (the mean one when it comes to making them eat healthy)

04/30/2010 - Day 3 CO - Haunted By A Moose

Today reminded us of the Chevy Chase movie Vacation when they finally reach Wally World, and the big moose says, “Sorry folks, park’s closed” in that goofy, mechanical moose voice. The Son wants to play mini-golf in every state, including the ones that may happen to be cold and have snow! The first mini-golf was closed, but, fortunately, Adventure Golf was open, and the lady was very friendly. She even gave us a $1 discount per person - maybe because we actually braved the cold. Levi chose the Old West themed course, appropriate for CO. While we were golfing, the Rockies towering in the background, I was wearing gloves, and we even saw snow flurries!!

After a nice warm lunch, we tackled the Daughter’s goal – going to a zoo/aquarium/or some animal place in every state. We visited Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, recommended to us on our travel community: http://HelpUs.BestPlacesInTheUSA.com. The zoo is actually built on the side of the mountain, which made it very unique! They even had a ski lift to ride up and admire the view. Unfortunately, it closed early because of the snow flurries, and we weren’t able to ride it. (picture the Wally World moose telling us it was closed) We headed to the pony rides, and they had just closed, too! (more moose voice) It was very disappointing, but the Daughter was able to shake the disappointment, and we had fun anyway.

We fed crackers to the giraffes and discovered that their tongues are quite long and gross!! The elephants were awesome because the trainer came over and talked to us for probably 15 minutes about them. The snow leopards were our favorite, though. The Daughter went to the window to peer in, and one leopard, who was lying in the corner, got up and ran by the window, smacking it. The Daughter jumped about 10 feet! After that performance, we stood around watching the leopard for quite some time as it would run by and smack the window in front of us. After several passes, the leopard lost interest in us but started fighting with the other leopard.  We all thought it was one of the best zoos we had ever been to.

On the way home…did I just call the hotel “home?!” On the way back to our stuff, we stopped by Seven Falls, apparently named for the, you guessed it, 7 waterfalls. Fitting with the day, it was closed for renovation until the end of May. “Sorry Folks, Park’s Closed…”

-The Mom (aka Mrs. Griswold)

Note from The Dad:  First, I have to say the "Vacation" metaphor breaks down on several levels.  We are in a minivan, not a station wagon.  Mrs. Griswold does the driving so I can work.  I would never fall for Christie Brinkley because I personally believe her and Billy Joel are soul mates.  Let's not even get into the Cousin Eddie thing. Second, we need to stop bringing it up because I can't get the song out of my head now.  Make it stop!  Watching the video does help, as it seems to help me purge most of the 80's out of my memory...except my shirts with big collars...those are coming back.

04/30/2010 - Day 3 CO - Snow, Golf, and Giraffes

We think the kids would like blogging...if it wasn't part of their schoolwork:

"The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo was great! There was a ton of animals such as tigers, bears, eagles, penguins, giraffes, and gorillas. My favorite thing was feeding the giraffes. Did you know that giraffes have really long purple tongues? When we fed the giraffes, I fed a baby giraffe, and I saw an even smaller baby giraffe than the one I was feeding!

One of the things that looked fun was the ski lift, but we didn't know that it closed at 3:00 so we couldn't ride it because we were saving it for last. My favorite animals were the elephants and the snow leopard. I liked the elephants because we saw them when they were learning how to do tricks, and I liked the snow leopards. They were being very active. When we came up to the cage, one was sitting in the corner, and it jumped out at me and ran into the window! It kept jumping at us, but when we got out the camera, it was a different story. Then the other snow leopard woke up from his nap, and the snow leopards started to playfully fight!

This blog is much longer than my normal blog, but since we’re on the trip, I think my blogs will keep getting longer." 

-the daughter

"Hi everybody! DD here. It’s my first rating of a mini golf course. I had a lot of new experiences. It's my first experience golfing in the snow. I also have never done so good, yet so bad. I got a hole-in-one on a hard shot. It was one where if you get it in the hole, it goes down a tube and out to the real hole. So you face the trouble of it skipping over the hole, even if you get it in on the first shot. I was a little upset because I just got a “4” on the last hole, so I decided to go crazy. I did a bank shot to get there safely, and surprisingly, it went in.

But enough about my amazing shot. Except for my hole-in-one, I didn't do so well. Dad won with a 45. Mom came in second with a 49. Me with a 67 and my sister with a 69. My favorite hole had a bridge over water with no rails at all. It was really tricky because it could roll into the water, but surprisingly my whole family made it with no water balls.

Now onto the ratings: Adventure Miniature Golf Course had three 18 hole courses that are moderately hard. It was a fun course that took skill but still had fun tricks and loops. The customer service was excellent. Over all, I would rate this course a ten clubs out of ten. This is DD signing off."

- the son 

04/29/2010 - Day 2 CO

We woke to snow in Fort Collins…and then what they call muddy rain!  (Where DOES the dirt in the rain come from?  Do we want to know?)  After packing up our very lives into suitcases, we checked out and walked around Old Town, looking for a lunch spot.  Old Town is a quaint downtown district in Fort Collins, which has well-preserved historical buildings. Very Nice.

We stumbled upon Spicy Pickle for lunch and chose the counter seats facing the street to further enjoy the charming downtown.  The food held true to its name:  Chloe, upon taking her first bite of pickle said, “Whoa!  That’s spicy!” 

The rest of the day, we spent traveling to Colorado Springs and getting settled in there.  We did stop at the Colorado Visitor’s Center where Levi made himself comfy sitting in a corner reading a book about notorious criminals in Colorado’s history.  

Colorado Springs held another pleasant surprise as Hotwire.com (not a sponsor) got us our second excellent 3 star hotel for $49.  We went from a Hilton in Fort Collins to a Hyatt in Colorado Springs.  Wonderful hotels for the price.  The Hyatt Suites are excellent just for the amount of room they provide.  

We moved to a 1 bedroom Suite at a Hyatt with a kitchen for one night (for a $10 extra fee) only to find out there was only one bathroom, and you have to walk through the bedroom to get to that one bathroom...on the same night we let the kids have unlimited refills on soda.

Yeah, Grand Central Station... we should have just given them the bedroom.

Could have been worse - at least we didn't spend the ten bucks washing our car before it started raining dirt...

- Mike & Sheri    

04/28/2010 - Day 1 CO

Our first day started off with a bang…almost literally with the noise coming from our van.  We knew we couldn’t take it to the mountains as originally planned.    After much frustration in trying to get it into a repair shop, we were able to find a place that could fit in their schedule at 2pm; however, snow was predicted for the mountains the next couple days.  In order to not let it ruin our chance to see the mountains,  we rented a car.   

After a long, trying morning, we were finally off to the mountains.  It was sooooo worth it!  Rocky Mountain National Park was absolutely beautiful!  Much to our surprise, we hiked around part of Bear Lake on 4 feet of compressed snow!  We were hiking on so much snow that many of the trail signs were almost covered.  Our favorite was the handicapped accessible sign that was practically buried.  It was a little cold, especially when the wind blew, but we had so much fun that we were glad we went.  “Incredible” is all I can say about Rocky Mountain National Park.

In and around the park, we saw numerous mule deer.  Then, nearly at the visitor’s center on our way out of the park, we finally saw it – an elk!  There were a few grazing right beside the road.  The Dad rolled down his window to get a picture, and the Daughter rolled hers UP so that the elk couldn’t stick its head in the window!  (Can you tell she’s seen a few America’s Funniest Videos?)  The elk really was THAT close.

Dinner was a wonderful home-cooked meal at our friend’s house.  We had a nice time, eating, chatting, and even sitting on a couch, of all things.   Our kids introduced theirs to a game called “dark tag” which is basically hide-and-go-seek combined with tag, in the dark…I’m not sure our friends appreciate that one!  All in all, it was quite a first day. 

- The Mom

You can follow us around on the map at http://BestPlacesInTheUSA.com/USA/_trip.aspx and we'll soon have a bunch of pictures to share!