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.
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!!
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