I'm back from vacation. We finished up last week by heading out to the west side of the state with the Niemi's. They've got three kids almost the same age as ours, and the six of them play really well together.

We started things off by heading to Michigan Adventure in Muskegon. I went in with low expectations and I was suprisingly pleased. The place was great for our age kids - It's got both an amusement park and a water park, and most of the rides are geared towards younger kids. Nate got a chance to go on his first big roller coaster (Shivering Timbers) and I saw the true definition of fear when I looked over at him on the first big drop. At the end, he said it was scary, but fun. This thing beat the living crap out of you and just kept going and going. I heard somewhere that it was one of the longest wooden roller coasters in America. It was actually featured on a special on the discovery channel, which I found funny for such a small park. We closed the park out, leaving about 8:30 PM. The kids were beat and we headed to our hotel near Silver Lake.

The next day started off with a nasty forecast, so we headed north and hung out in Ludington to try and beat the rain. We hung out on Lake Michigan, where Emily found a pet fish and named it Blue. She wanted to bring it home so it could live in our hot tub. From there we headed down to Silver Lake and hung at the sand dunes. I couldn't believe that the kids climbed as much as they did. We were beat by the end, but not so much so that we couldn't hit the go-karts. We took the kids on the regular karts, and then Mark and I took a ride on the slick track karts. These karts go in an oval, and it's more about finesse riding, something I apparently have no idea about. You need to find just the ride speed, positioning and counter-steering to drive the track, and I found none of them. I must have spun-out about 20 times.

On Saturday, we headed to the Rainbow Ranch to go horse-back riding. The highlight of my vacation was having Emily sit with me on my horse during the ride. She talked non-stop - to the horse, to the other horses, asking questions, commenting on the scenery around her. I got to see a horse-back ride through the wonderous eyes of a 3 year old and it was so much fun! She would tell the horse (Honda) to watch out for the other horses poop in front of her, tell the horse that she wanted to go "Too Fast" again (trotting). We rode on this giant draft horse that could care less what I was telling it to do. It just followed the other horses. On our way back, we stopped off to see Will's Mom and have lunch with her, and then stopped by to see my brother Jon and his wife Beth (and their new puppy Zoe). Great vacation, wouldn't have changed a thing.