Certainly, this was a busy weekend, what with the trip out to the Hills and lots of vacationy goodness. Let’s sum up.

Thursday:
We took off for the hills at around 8:30 (had to stop to fuel up the car and grab some papers I’d left at work) and did the trip in good time: we arrived at the cabin a few miles outside of Lead just before 3pm. Our timing was good — about the same time we got out to the cabin, everyone else (driving in from “Eestriver”) had arrived in Lead and had picked up the house key and gone grocery shopping.

The cabin was great: fully furnished and stocked with utensils, appliances (fridge, microwave, satellite tv, washer and dryer, et cetera), and able to sleep 10 before you even get into things like kids in sleeping bags and whatnot. Some folks took pictures, but there are plenty on the website, so there you go.

We’d talked about going out and doing something that evening/late afternoon, but after all the packing was done everyone was pretty much in the mood for barbeque and vegging out. We grilled brats and I tossed in Titan A.E. for the kids to watch in the meantime. (We’d brought out our old DVD player for my parents — get them into the modern age and all, so I figured to put it to use while we were there.) Jackie had invested in super-soakers and laser-tag-like badges for all the kids as well, so much fun was had as the sun went down. After supper we tossed in The Italian Job, which my folks hadn’t seen, and some of us even watched it.

Later in the evening, after Reggie taught me how to lose big at Texas Hold-em, we broke the shrinkwrap on Apples to Apples and taught everyone to play… that was around 9pm, and I think we played until about midnight. Yikes. Everyone had a pretty good time with it, I guess :)

Friday
Dad and Reggie and I headed over to the Tomahawk Country Club in the morning, after the womenfolk assured us they’d ‘find something to do’.

This scenic course is highlighted by the numerous trees that can alter your shots and water hazards coming into play on three holes. The greens are sloped, and the fairways are extremely narrow.

I talk more about how things played out for me in a previous post. In this first time around, I didn’t get beat nearly as badly as I did in the second round — I was only five strokes back from Dad and Reggie, which I’m going to blame mostly on some really bad pitch-shots. I didn’t lose a ball.

We got back to the cabin right at noon, ate lunch, and headed down to the D.C. Booth Historic National Fish Hatchery in Spearfish, by way of Scenic Spearfish Valley Byway (Hwy 14) and a stop at Roughlock Falls. Both of these stops were quite a blast from the past for Bonnie and me, since we grew up doing summer vacations in the Black Hills and visited both of these attractions at least a couple times — they sell big bags of fish food at the hatchery and watching the kids holler when the fish went crazy at the dropped food really reminded me of what it was like back in the day.

…but I don’t remember it being so HOT.

By the time we’d finished up with the hatchery, everyone was hot and pretty tired/grumpy, so we headed back to the cabin for supper (steaks and pork chops) and downtime. More card playing, more Apples to Apples (at the gleeful request of those who’d been taught it the night before, which I count as a success), and I popped in an episode of Firefly to spread the faith (Paige and I watched Our Mrs. Reynolds all the way through after most everyone else had crashed).

Saturday
The night before, we’d all agreed that planning to do tourist stuff in the middle of the hot afternoon was lunacy, so we planned out Saturday with the idea that 2pm was about when we’d get done, instead. Good plan (and even better when I remembered some planning failures during the first day visiting London and we dropped one stop from the schedule and turned the Crazy Horse memorial into a drive-by instead of a visit).

So, we drove past Crazy Horse and into Custer State Park, via the Needle Highway, which is narrow and twisty and features a number of one-lane tunnels that are quite cool. The drive is fun if you’re at the wheel and sometimes nerve-wracking if you’re not — I was driving, so it was fun.

We stopped at Sylvan Lake around eleven and ate a picnic lunch, then rented some paddle boats and toddled around the lake for a bit (I don’t remember it being such hard work when I was a kid) and headed for Keystone (small town at the base of Mt. Rushmore).

There, we had some ice cream at Dairy Queen (and met up with Justin, who’d been off for the morning with his mom, who took off back home after dropping him off) to get everyone’s blood sugar and mood up, then headed up to Mt. Rushmore (find your own website, sheesh). Stared in awe, watched the little movie in the nicely-air-conditioned theatre, and that was that. The place has changed quite a bit, but the old cafeteria building is still there (if off to the side and serving a different purpose) and I even saw a food-begging chipmunk on a bench.

By then, then menfolk were pretty much done with tourism for the day, but the kids and ladies wanted to try out the President’s Alpine Slide, so we split up the cars differently and the menfolk headed back to relax play some more golf.

We were about halfway back (call it 30 miles) to the cabin when we realized that the ladies had the key to the cabin.

Anyway, we got back to the cabin and got inside…

…nevermind how; there’s a damage deposit and we got all of it back, so it doesn’t matter, does it?

… and off to the course, where (a) I golfed exactly the same score (b) Reggie pointed out what was screwing up my chip shots, which I only wish he’d noticed about 10 holes earlier.

Everyone else was back from the slide before we actually started playing (they stopped at the course), and they said they had a really good time. Cool.

Saturday night, the guys ended up reheating the pork chops and steaks and making sandwiches out of them with some con queso sauce… yummy. Everyone crashed pretty early, because we’d been up late and getting up DAMN early most of the trip (which happens in a house containing a year-old child :).

Sunday
We packed up and cleaned the house, which took a little while, got everything into the right cars, and decided to wander down Deadwood’s historic mainstreet for a bit, where I became enamored of a replica peacemaker that I figured I could order online just as cheaply (and I was right). Justin and I wanted to do an old west style photo, but Jackie demurred and put us off (temporarily — we have such studios here in Denver as well) and we headed back to Denver around eleven, arriving around five in the afternoon to some very happy dogs.

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In summary, it was a very successful vacation — the first in which the entire extended family was in attendance since 1992 (Breckenridge, and I think possibly the last time any of us went skiing, by some weird coincidence that makes no sense). It was great to go back to what has always felt like ‘home’ as far as childhood vacations go.

A little different, a little the same, and all good.