Best Vacation EVER!!!!!

For Memorial Weekend we joined my parents and 2 younger siblings and went up to Lava Hot Springs, Idaho. You know those vacations where everything that could go wrong does go wrong? That sentence describes our vacation perfectly. But it was also one of the funniest and most memorable vacations we've experienced yet!

We left Friday afternoon with the plan of meeting up with my sister and her husband who were driving down from Pocatello for the evening to have dinner with us. We got there and my Dad went in to get the keys to our rooms. We decided to unpack later and drove down the street to find Char and Jeff at the pizza place we usually eat at when we go (not that we go that often... we just eat there every time we do go). The first major part of the adventure started as we drove down the hill behind the hotel to our motel rooms (it was a hotel and a motel). We pull up and notice that a fire alarm is blaring somewhere, and as my dad opens door number one, hot steam bursted out. From where we were standing it looked like smoke so we all thought it was a fire. That is .... we thought it was a fire until we saw the river of water come flowing out.

The note on the door says that they were having problems with a water pipe, so the water would be shut off from 5:30 to 6:30. It was 8:30 when we opened the door. But apparently the problem hadn't been fixed yet...


So then we opened door number 2 right next to it.

The first time we looked in the bathroom the tile that is on the floor in the left picture above was still intact, but was drooping down because it was so full of water. Then, as you see in the otherpicture, that ceiling panal was not the only thing to fall! The bathroom was destroyed...

Back to the first room...

Everything was SOAKED with scalding hot water. The floor was completely flooded and water was constantly splashing down from the pipes above the bathroom...
This video is for Ted. Just a demonstration of how much water there was in the room.

We enjoyed the lovely scenery behind us as we waited to figure everything out.
My dad went up to the front desk three times before anything happened. They just kept telling him that they'd called maintenance. Besides the scenery we watched the river coming out of the rooms we were supposedly supposed to sleep in that night. When they said "Hot Mineral Baths" we didn't think they literally meant in our rooms!

We decided to drive up to Pocatello for the night (there weren't too many other options in Lava Hot Springs). My dad called a couple of hotels to find rooms, but it was memorial weekend. After a couple of overly complicated phone calls my dad tracked down two rooms. Ted and Sarah went to stay with Char and Jeff and the rest of us went to the hotel.

But the adventure doesn't end there... The next morning we all woke up and went to breakfast together before we left Char and Jeff to go swimming. We ate at a great place there in Pocatello. Elmers! Danny's grandpa's name was Elmer, so that was fun. It was really good. I think that if we ever end up living in Pocatello, we'll go there more often.We took off to make the half an hour drive back to Lava, and Char (who makes great mix CD's) handed my dad a "Broken Pipe Mix" in honor of the night before. So we drove to Lava listening to some of my dad's and Char's favorite songs, like "Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road." Here are the some of the road blocks we passed on the way. Gotta love Idaho!So this post is getting long, but it's not quite over... We got to Lava and went to the hot springs first, and later went down to the big swimming pool where they had 2 new water slides. After a forty-five minute wait we were three people away from our turn and the pool was closed. The line was stopped completely because in the pool next us a girl jumped off the huge platform, landed wrong and landed herself with a major spinal injury. They had to call an ambulance, but I don't think there are any hospitals in Lava, so it took longer than we expected.

So... after an hour wait, we went down this very exciting waterslide. Needless to say it was a one time thing. We headed to the smaller indoor pool to climb the climbing wall and all that. After a while, and luckily right when we were about to leave it started pouring outside and everyone came running to the indoor pool. We decided to make a run for the car. But it wasn't just raining...giant hail came pelting down. We made a run for the hot pools before we took off, but lightning and thunder convinced us that it was time to go home.

That was the end of our trip. We drove home enjoying Char's Broken Pipe Mix, laughing at all that happened in less than 24 hours. We love Lava Hot Springs!!!