Spring break

Oh joy, o frabjous week that feels like it's almost over already. Spring break -- those wonderful words. But it's Wednesday evening, which means only four more full days. Sigh. I feel unprepared for the remaining month of school. Why is teaching so impossible?

OK, must stop whining. Think about what a nice time we've had so far. We have had a nice time, more or less. Saturday was a get-stuff-done day, lots of laundry, etc. Sunday we took the kids miniature golfing. Then on Monday we packed up my little Subaru (113,000 miles on it and counting) and drove to Glenwood Springs for a short vacation.

It took us a while to choose Glenwood Springs. After we gave up on Death Valley (too expensive, all those air fares, etc.), we decided to go somewhere fairly close by, but that's problematic in March -- still very much winter in Colorado, Wyoming, etc. Rocket Boy suggested the Sand Dunes in southern Colorado and I think that would have been fun. But then I came up with the idea of Glenwood Springs and couldn't get it out of my head -- that glorious, enormous pool. I was sure the boys would love it. So we went there.

It's a three-hour drive, or would have been, if our normal turn-off on Highway 6 hadn't been closed. Here's the notice on the CDOT road closure web page:  

***US 6 Eastbound / Westbound & Hwy. 119 Rockfall Mitigation

(Milemarker 257-271) (through March 2015) Su-Fr 10p-8a full closure

from SH 93 to SH 119 for rock scaling and rockfall mitigation installation.***

Unfortunately, I hadn't thought to check on this. I mean, you don't, you know? You just assume that major roads will be open. Oh well. To cope with this road closure we had to drive all the way through Blackhawk and Central City, and take the Central City Parkway down to Idaho Springs. We were not happy about this.

But hey, it's Spring Break and we had plenty of time to kill. Not my choice of how to kill it, but hey.

Anyway, we got to Glenwood Springs around 4:30 pm, I think it was, and checked into our quite nice budget hotel (the Glenwood Springs Inn). Here we are doing what you do on vacations, or at least what the twins think you do: lie on the bed in the hotel room watching TV channels that we don't get at home.

After a bit of this, the twins and I left Rocket Boy resting and went for a walk to explore Glenwood Springs. It was a lovely spring evening -- no coats necessary. Our hotel was a few blocks away from the hot springs pool, so we walked over there. Here we are on a bridge overlooking the pool. Pretty impressive, no? It's an enormous pool -- two blocks long is how they describe it -- and in such a lovely setting. You can also see a bit of the two giant water slides in the foreground -- more about them later.

We had thought we'd go swimming that first night, but then we thought about prices. I understand that they need to stay in business, but they really nickel-and-dime you. We had bought our motel's "stay and swim" package, which gave us a slight discount on two adult swim passes. But that was only for one day, and we still had to pay for the twins. They discount the cost of the pool at night -- after 9 pm, that is. For us to go in the pool from, say, 6 to 7 pm, would have cost us about $65, or $25 if we'd used our passes (not counting what we'd paid for them via the room rate), but then it would have cost us $65 the next day. We decided to just look at the pool on Monday and use our passes on Tuesday.

On Tuesday morning we got up pretty early and had breakfast at the hotel. We'd had dinner the night before at a Village Inn and even with "kids eat free" it was pricey, so we were looking forward to a free breakfast. Unfortunately our hotel has only a tiny lobby and breakfast consisted mostly of doughnuts and coffee. I had a bagel and cream cheese, which was OK, and they did have some yogurt, bananas, etc. It just wasn't quite what we were expecting. The hotel is in the process of building a dining room. There's also a breakfast place next door, but it wasn't open on Tuesdays.

After breakfast we convinced the twins to go swimming, with mixed results. I felt glorious when I stepped into the hot end of the pool -- but I'm a grown-up. Little kids don't like such hot water. What really turned them off, though, was the taste of the water. Yuck! I'd forgotten to warn them that hot springs water isn't the tastiest. We spent about an hour and a half in the pool, twins complaining nonstop. On top of everything else, the water slides didn't open until noon. Rocket Boy and I were OK with that, since you actually have to PAY EXTRA to go down the water slides. Talk about nickel-and-diming.

Anyway, at 11 am we got out of the pool (stamped our hands so we could come back later), got dry and dressed, and drove downtown to find a place for lunch. We found a nice sandwich/breakfast place and had a good lunch -- for about $45 (and that's with no tip -- you had to order at the counter and pick it up yourself). Ouch. Then we drove back to the hotel to change and get ready for a ride up the mountain. Incidentally, it would have been easy to walk from our hotel to the hot springs place and from there to our downtown lunch and from there to the gondolas. But with the twins and their propensity for meltdowns it seemed safer to drive everywhere. Sigh. I try not to get too stressed about how we're raising our children wrong. Sometimes it's OK to drive.

Besides the giant pool, Glenwood Springs' other claim to fame is its caves. When Rocket Boy and I came here for a post-honeymoon trip back in 2002 (a gift from my book group), we enjoyed a cave tour. On this trip, we weren't sure we could count on the twins for good cave behavior, so we thought we'd save the cave for another time. However, since RB and I were last there, the cave owner has built a sort of amusement park up on the mountain, so we thought we'd take a look. We paid $42 to ride these gondolas up the hill (the ride down again was included too).

Kid A enjoyed the ride, but Kid B was not so sure. You end up going very very high, with a great view of the whole Glenwood Springs area. Kid A kept pointing out to Kid B that the cable was very strong and there was no way our gondola would crash to the ground.

But that morning I had been watching the news on TV about the German airliner crashing in the Alps, and perhaps that had put crashes on Kid B's mind too. I have to admit I sympathized with him -- I didn't find the gondola ride that scary but I kept thinking "there are no guarantees, ever."

Anyway, we survived, and the amusement park at the top looked like it would be fun, if it were open. Because it is March, most of the rides were closed down. The kids went through a maze and climbed in a sort of mock cave. We also found a shooting gallery where for 50 cents you could fire a laser gun at targets, causing doors to open and other things to move. The most fun was a movie theater showing 10-minute movies in 4D (3D, plus seats that moved around to match what was happening on the screen). I kept my eyes closed most of the time, but the twins enjoyed it. You were supposed to pay $4/person or have a Day Pass, but nobody checked to see if we had a pass.

After we rode the gondolas down the hill again, we went back to the pool, because the twins really wanted to go on the water slides. Rocket Boy paid for some slides, and he and the twins went down a couple of times. The second time down, they didn't have enough punches left for RB to ride down with Kid B, so Kid B rode alone on a single inner tube -- and apparently took a serious spill inside the slide. It's hard for him to explain to us things that happen to him, but I think his inner tube flipped around and then over, and he ended up sliding down without the tube. I saw the damage when we got home -- bruises and scrapes all over his back and arms.
Stupid Glenwood Hot Springs pool and their stupid nickel-and-diming rules.

After the water slide debacle we had fun playing in the pool for another hour or so -- I floated around and the twins and RB threw a little soft ball around for a while until some weird people stole it. Yes, that's right, stole it and took it to another part of the pool. Rocket Boy finally tracked them down and when they realized they had been discovered, they threw the ball away from them as far as they could. I asked RB if the twins had been bothering them with the ball and he said no -- they'd been playing in a part of the pool that seems to be sort of designated for kids to play, and there were other people playing with balls and things there.

By the time we left the pool that night, I was really done with Glenwood Hot Springs.

We had another expensive dinner at Village Inn and another minimal breakfast the next morning at the hotel, and then we had to drive home in a snowstorm -- the price you pay for having good weather the first two days of the trip.

So, spring break. Four more days, most of which I'll spend grading and doing class prep. Plus I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow, at which she'll tell me I'm much too fat.

But for all that, spring break is going OK. I realize I just made our vacation sound like a horror story, but it wasn't. Just more expensive than we would have liked, and with some unfortunate occurrences. But that's life with twins, really, and we made some good memories. Maybe, too, I'll enjoy the next few days more because we're at home, and we know how to have inexpensive fun in Boulder.