So, How Was YOUR Vacation?

Time for a recap of the last two weeks, so I thought I'd look back over our very ambitious list of plans and see how we fared. It should be noted that when we made out our very ambitious list of plans, I was well aware that we were probably biting off more than we could chew; however, our children had talked of nothing but vacation for weeks and were not entirely sold on the whole "stay-cation" notion. Is it actually a vacation, they mused, if you don't at least, you know, leave town? (And in truth, they were all a little miffed that Ohio wasn't included in the list of places to visit these past two weeks.) So I over-compensated in the hope that their extreme expectations of a TWO! WEEK! VACATION! would be somewhat, if not utterly, fulfilled.

So let's see . . . what was on our list of things to do?

1. Dallas World Aquarium - Check

2. Ft. Worth Water Gardens - Check

3. Six Flags - Check, check, check, check

4. Tarantula Train - Oh, this one's kind of embarrassing. You know the old saying, "Opposites attract"? I've always felt that was true in many respects regarding Randy and myself. He's sporty, I'm clumsy; he's articulate, me--not so much; he likes big crowds, I like small gatherings; he's spontaneous, I like to know what's around the next corner; he's methodical, I'm impulsive. Need I go on? (By the way, "spontaneous" and "impulsive" are not the same thing.) (Because I said so.)

But the trait we both share to the nth degree? PROCRASTINATION. Oh, we excel at procrastinating. It's terrible, it's shameful, but we are masters of the art. I say this because it isn't like we just up and decided Saturday morning that we'd like to ride the Tarantula Train; no, for weeks we'd planned to make this excursion part of our "stay-cation." (For those of you scratching your heads, I'm not sure where the name originated but the Tarantula Train is either part of or the same as one of the trains on the Grapevine Vintage Railroad. Two trains--a steam engine and a diesel locomotive--operate Thursdays through Sundays and travel on a picturesque route between Grapevine and Fort Worth and back, allowing for a brief visit in the Stockyards vicinity.)

I had visited the T.T. website numerous times, had the departure and arrival times memorized, duly noted that tickets could be purchased in advance . . . oh, and we had firmly decided that no diesel locomotive was good enough for the Todds. No! We were gonna do it up right! It was "Puffy" the Steam Engine for us! "Okay, let's see, 'Puffy' only runs on Saturday, so we'd better get our tickets now," I thought to myself . . . on Friday night at approximately 11:45 p.m. Let me give you our options at that point:

Option A: One adult and four children could reserve seats from Grapevine to Ft. Worth; No adults and one child could reserve returning seats to Grapevine.
Option B: Go to kids, hat in hand, and admit we'd messed up by waiting 'til the last minute to try to take a ride on "Puffy," and acknowledge the bitter truth that there weren't enough seats for all of us. Want to guess which option we chose?

5. Turner Falls - We actually had good intentions for the trek to Turner Falls, but because we stayed at Six Flags so late on Monday night and slept in the morning we planned to head to T.F., we decided to punt and go back to Six Flags instead. I'm pretty sure the kids had no objections, based on how quickly they changed their clothes and hightailed it to the van!

6. Ft. Worth Zoo - I'll be honest--this was an outing I tacked on at the last minute and didn't even bother to share with the fam; we've all been to the zoo a couple of times and I couldn't really see the sense in going on a 100+degree day when the only things we were liable to see were bats in the belfry. We punted.

7. Mini golf - We punted again because, hello, 100+degrees!

8. Ft. Worth Museum of Science and History - Well, we sort of did this and sort of didn't. We made an effort--how's that? We moseyed on over to the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame (only in Texas!) after our trip to the Omni (more about that later) but because so much of the museum is under construction, many of the exhibits are "still in storage" so we opted not to drop the coin necessary to see a whole lotta nothin'.

9. Hawaiian Falls and/or NRH20- I had high hopes for one of these, I really did. The kids were hankering for Hurricane Harbor but we just didn't want to spend that kind of money, and these seemed fairly affordable. I just couldn't seem to get Randy on board with the idea . . . yeah, yeah, let Randy take the blame. That's the ticket! No, it just never seemed to fit into our plans, especially when we firmed up plans for our Argyle trip and knew we could swim for free!

10. Omni Theater - We went here Sunday afternoon after worshipping at Cross Timbers w/my brother and sister-in-law and enjoying a delicious lunch at Dos Gringos. We saw Deep Sea and my kids were thoroughly grossed out by all the crunching of fish skeletons but Johnny Depp, "Captain Jack Sparrow" himself, was one of the narrators so it all came out in the wash.

11. Rangers game - Okay, so we didn't look at the schedule that closely; turns out they were playing the Yankees during the first week of our vacation so the person hooking us up with tickets said we had to avoid that week, and then they were out of town until the following weekend when we were in Argyle. So that's that.

12. Ice skating - Darcy got an invitation to an ice-skating birthday party the first week of our vacation, so we simply struck this from our list. She went today and said she did well enough to skate around in the middle of the rink. I could just picture her hanging on to the wall for two hours but I don't know why--it seems anything Darcy decides to do, she does well. Lucky duck.

13. Bowling/Laser tag - Bowling yes, laser tag no. No loss.

14. Ft. Worth Stockyards - Does it count if we drove past the Stockyards???

15. Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus - And this wasn't even on the list!!

And that brings us to this past weekend where we spent three fun-filled days in Argyle. The weather was gloriously cool and we absolutely had a blast swimming, playing Crokinole, gorging ourselves on homemade ice cream AND the Olympics, and a couple of kids even squeezed in some rock climbing! My sister-in-law has already suggested that we make our end-of-summer get-together a family tradition, and I couldn't agree more!