Catching Up... The Hunt, and Great Wolf Lodge :D

 While Tate and Grandpa trekked to Wyoming to hunt white-tail deer...

... they managed to be extras in a hunting show, being filmed at the lodge...

... and to do some sight-seeing.  No pictures of Little Bighorn (Custer's Last Stand), but I bet you'll recognize this place...

... if you're not from the US and you haven't seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this is Devil's Tower, a national park about five minutes from their hunting lodge.

(And, for a bonus - a kind of creepy bit of trivia - did you know that rattlesnakes climb that tower and live on the top of it?  Yikes!)

Meanwhile, Grandma and Grandpa wanted to do something special for Wyatt and Gunnar, to keep things fair(-ish) and Grandma cooked up a surprise.  I sent Wyatt off to school, let Gunnar go melt his brain play video games, while I stealthily packed their bags.  Grandma came to get Gunnar and me to run an errand with her and we picked up Wyatt from school, when she handed them each a sheet of pictures she'd gotten off the internet.  They're getting the picture, wink wink nudge nudge.

And four hours later, we were here...

... and they were doing this...

You can't see everything in this photo, but there's a large wave pool on the left, an activity pool in the back, pools and splash areas for really little kids out of the photo to the right, a big splashy play structure in the middle with a couple of medium-size waterslides, and the four BIG waterslides in the back.

The huge bucket above, dumped 1000 gallons of water about every five minutes.  Amazing.

The boys loved the wave pool, and spent a lot of time there :D

But the real attraction is the slides, four of them.  Two one-or-two person slides take off from the lower landing, and oh my goodness they are fast, twisty-turny fun.  But the big, four-at-a-time slides go from way, way up there.  (Hence, the elevator lifting the big tubes to the top.)

Of course, they jumped right in and went down the "big blue tube".

Wyatt...

... and Gunnar...

They they went for the Big Kahuna, the Howlin' Tornado.  If you've ever driven by on the freeway ((I-5, heading south, near Chehalis), you might have seen this from a distance.

I've seen it lots of times, and let me tell you - I seriously underestimated its size.  The website claims that the funnel (you see the big circle) is 65 feet tall. Yah.  That yellow and red tube is a good 8-10 feet in diameter, and that drop into the funnel... well, it feels like a free-fall.  The fence in the foreground is about 6 feet tall, for reference.  Oh my gracious, it was crazy!  You feel like you're going a million miles an hour!  And you slosh around, up and down the sides of the funnel, before settling into the tube that takes you out to the pool.  And let me also tell you that two growing boys along with mom and grandma have some serious momentum!  Because, I really, really must tell you that Grandma Grasshopper and I also went on every single waterslide at least once.  Because we rock.

It looks like this at night... wheeeeeee.  (From their website.)

 Just for perspective (also from their website) here's a picture inside the funnel.  And remember, that exit tube is 8-10 feet tall.  Yah.

You could say they had a good time :D