Urban Adventure 2012 - The Video

Boat Buying, Canoeing, Zip Lining, Gambling, Partying. Welcome to the weekend.

It's pretty much not physically possible for us to have crammed anything else into our weekend.

I got off work a couple hours early on Friday, and headed home to finish packing for the weekend. I did not have to go pick up the kids, because they all stayed at my mom's house for the bulk of the weekend.

I got home, and found Ben in frantic-panic mode.

You see, he just purchased a double-decker pontoon off of Craig's List, had met the seller during the week to check it out and pay a deposit, but was supposed to meet the guy in Angola that afternoon to complete the sale and get it dropped off in our lake.

But see, I hadn't gotten off work as early as he'd anticipated, so we were getting a late start. And the guy was already in Angola, and we were still a good hour away from even leaving our house, which put us about two and a half hours away from meeting our new boat.

Ben and Pontoon Guy tried to work out an arrangement, and the guy actually agreed to just leave the pontoon at the lake access point, and we could mail him a check for the amount we owed him.

This is a pretty trusting guy.

Since we were a bit freed up on time, I drove to Meijer to order Noah's birthday cake for his party on Sunday and pick up a few other necessities.

As soon as I got home, Frantic Ben was back, as he'd gotten a phone call from pontoon-seller-guy, who instead of dropping the boat off for us to pick up, was going to stay in the area for dinner and wait for us.

Maybe not so trusting after all.

So we hurriedly finished packing and made our way to Angola, where we picked up the boat and deposited it at our pier.

I tried to get a video of Ben going down the slide into the shallows, but I apparently didn't capture it. Instead, here's a photo:

It took a bit of time to get the boat into the water, towed back to our pier (it has no motor), then deposit the trailer back in our lot. We still had a four hour trip ahead of us into central Michigan. So we hit the road.

This was a mini-anniversary-trip for us, as last weekend was our 11th anniversary. For Father's Day, I had purchased Ben a new GoPro Hero 2 helmet-cam, so for our anniversary I decided to book us a trip where we could put said camera to good use.

Without going too overboard, I found a zip-line tour at a place about four hours away from us, then booked a canoe trip for the same day. I found a nearby campground and booked us a site.

We discussed bringing the pop-up camper, but given that we were only staying for one night, and were gonna get there super late, we decided to opt for just the tent.

At 10p.m., when we pulled into our campsite and unloaded our tent gear, we re-thought even that. It was super late and super dark, and our tent is ridiculously big.....so we decided to take the seats out of the back of the van, blow up the air mattress, and sleep in the van.

Yep, we're hard-core.

In the morning, we called the canoe guy, who runs a pretty nice little operation, and got our canoe drop-off scheduled for 10 a.m. We had breakfast at Burger King, discussed the merits or lack thereof of the new bacon sundae, then met our canoe guy.

Our trip down Cedar River was lovely, and mostly uneventful except for the one time when Ben decided to get OUT of the canoe while I was deep in video-concentration-mode, leading to this priceless caught on tape moment where I got dumped in the water.

After canoeing, we cleaned up a bit, had some lunch, then headed for our zip-line tour.

Zip lining was quite enjoyable, we had a great time, as can best be demonstrated by our video here:



Thanks, GoPro, for the excellent footage.

After ziplining, it was time to make the trek home. We were four hours away from home and knew we wouldn't get home until too late for it to make sense for us to pick the kids up from my mom's.

Ben said, "Let's go to the casino. It will take us less time to get there than to get home, and we might as well do something besides just drive all evening."


And since I'm a sucker for doing random crap, we called up some friends who were agreeable to meeting us at Four Winds, we gambled some money away, had a nice evening, and then made the drive home at one in the morning.

I got up at 7:15 to pick up the kids, because I missed them for heaven's sake, and because we had to get a jump start on the day, because, of COURSE, we had a jam-packed schedule what with Noah's birthday party at the baseball diamond in the afternoon.

The party was a big hit, our local minor league ball park has done a lot of work over the last year to make the Cove an awesome family experience, the kids played in the bouncy houses and inflatable obstacle courses, watched the game, ate as much popcorn as they could, splashed in the splash pad, climbed in the playground, and watched Noah on the JumboTron as the audience sang him happy birthday and Swoop gave him a special birthday baseball.

Happy Birthday Noah!!

I have a confession.

I work out a lot - generally, five or six days a week. I lift weights three times a week.

But I cannot do a pull-up.

This isn't all that horrible, and not that uncommon for women in their mid-thirties, to be sure. But I've decided it is high time this comes to an end.

I will be able to pull-ups.

At least five. Unassisted. Thus is my goal.

I recently accomplished my last stated goal, which was to be able to squat 150 pounds. I set this goal for myself about seven months ago, when I first started my weight lifting program, and I was squatting merely the 45-lb bar. That goal seemed like an impossibility back then.

Last week, I squatted 3 sets of 5 reps at 155.

It was very empowering.

Now, on to that dreaded pull-up bar, which mocks me every day at the gym.

I will conquer you.


If Sophie can do it.....

It's one of those things we'll laugh about later. I mean, now.

A couple weeks ago, Ben and I had a long overdue date night, where we ate dinner at the restaurant we went to the night he proposed to me, then went to see a ridiculously cheesy Adam Sandler movie. I won't go into specifics, but let me just tell you, Vanilla Ice saved that movie, yo.

This date night took place in Angola, and Ben's parents graciously watched the kids for us, overnight even. 

In the morning, Ben and I woke up, headed to Ben's parents to say good morning to the kids, and then geared up for the roughly 3.5 mile organized walk/run around Lake Gage.

Since Ben's knee surgery, he has been itching to get into more physical activity; add to that all the awesome races I have been doing and Ben decided doggonit, he was going to run this race and get back into race shape come hell or high water. 

Here we are before the run.

Around Lake Gage is a fairly tough course, I gotta tell you, as I've repeatedly told my sister-in-law, who runs that course regularly, which puts to shame my neighborhood course with its pathetic little inclines I call hills. 

Also, I haven't been training much lately on running. I've been doing a crap-ton of weight lifting, and feeling pretty good about it, but not much running.

So the run was kind of tough. I don't know the exact distance, and I timed it myself on my heart rate monitor watch, and came up with a time of 31:07 for 3-point-something miles. 

Ben followed me in at about 40:40 or so, not bad for his first race, but with sore ankles and knees.

Since then, his knee has only gotten worse, stiffens up easily, and I keep telling him this means he should probably lay off the running and stick to biking-type activities, to which he responds, "You telling me that just makes me want to keep running even more."

He might be a tad stubborn.

Our kids come by it honestly, at least.

Anyway, afterwards, the kids played with their cousins for a bit in this here tree:

At some point, cousin Nathan got a load of tree sap in his hand, and apparently wiped it on my Noah's head. I didn't know this until much later.

As in, after we'd driven back to South Bend for the kids' t-ball game, and then driven back to Angola to swim in the lake for a while.

When I did notice it, it was because Noah was picking at it while at his Grandma's house. It was about a quarter size patch of sticky sap. I told him when we got back to the camper, I'd clean it out for him.

That didn't happen.

Because? At some point, while I was not paying attention, he kept picking at it.

And picking.

And picking.

And picked himself a bald spot.

At first, I was horrified, and tried to figure out how to cover it up. 

Should I shave his head? Load it with hair gel and perform a mini-combover? Make him wear a hat every day for the next two months until it is at least mildly hidden?

And then I got over it. 

Because, he's still cute.

(There. Problem solved. Kid, you're wearing a T-ball helmet until September.)