As soon as we arrived, we located the main lodge and checked to see if our room was ready. They don't guarantee your check-in until 6pm, so I was pleasantly surprised that our room was ready before 2pm. They gave us directions to our mountain villa, two days worth of passes to the water park and a pair of keys. Take a left out of the parking lot, go left at the fork in the road, and turn left at the second road on the left.
We missed the second left and ended up going way around the mountain, much farther than we needed to. Then, we turned around and made our way back. Maybe we missed the turn because the villas were so much nicer than any of us had imagined. When we did find the right road and the right villa number, we parked and grabbed our bags to take them inside. I approached the door, stuck the key into the lock and turned it. The door swung open and a gentleman standing in the living area of the villa leaned back toward the door, and invited us in. I must have had a puzzled look on my face and I must have hesitated because he reassured us again and waved us in. He said that there must have been some mistake because the management told him he could have use of that villa all day long; that it hadn't been rented out. Turns out, he was a realtor and he had set up that villa for showing to prospective buyers (I want to buy it). While we unloaded our gear, he packed up his stuff and made his way out. It was his book that you noticed on the table, Pops

The Mountain Villa that we stayed in has 2 bedrooms and a loft bedroom. The loft and one of the other bedrooms have two queen size beds each. The master bedroom has a king size bed giving us a total of five beds that could, in theory, sleep 10 people. The bed in the master bedroom was probably the most comfortable bed that I've ever slept on. Sig agreed. The master bedroom has a TV and the master bedroom has a whirlpool tub. There was a TV in the living area, and the kitchen was pretty well stocked with whatever you might need to cook while you're there. Outside, we could see a chair lift within a couple hundred feet of the back deck. I would imagine that if you were staying in that villa for a week and you had some beginner skiers/boarders, that location would be just about perfect. I say beginner because the side of the mountain that we were on was much less steep than the main face of the mountain by the main lodge.

We got changed into our cold-weather gear and headed for the tubing park. We were at the tubing park by 2pm and we bought all-day passes for tubing. The options were $10 for 1 hour, $15 for 2 hours, or $20 for all day. Everyone seemed really stoked about the fun we were about to have, so I opted for all-day passes. Tubing is great fun and we all look forward to doing it again. You'll get an idea of how much fun we had when I tell you about Sunday. At the tubing park, you use inner-tubes that are covered with a nylon (? not sure about that) sleeve. That sleeve has handles and a leash. To get to the top of the hill, you hand the leash to an attendant and sit down on the tube. The attendant hooks the leash onto a bar that is connected to the tow wire and the wire pulls you up the hill. At the top of the hill, you just roll out of the tube and stand up. Another attendant unhooks the tube and hands the leash to you which you then use to pull the tube over to the launch area. The tube park at Boyne Mountain has three lanes, but only two were open when we were there. This is where I would have posted the GPS tracks we laid down when we were tubing. Unfortunately, I deleted them accidentally when I went for my run on Monday night. In any case, we ended up covering 2 1/4 miles and I clocked a top speed of 23.3 MPH. Looking at the tracks afterwards, it appeared that we only got seven runs down the hill before we decided to call it a day. It felt like a lot more than that.

After tubing, we went back to the villa, ate dinner, and changed for the water park. Dinner was tacos for Elmo and QPF while Bubbles, Sig and I assembled taco salad from the same basic ingredients. We had prepared everything the night before and all we had to do was warm the beef and beans and assemble the parts. Yummy.

Apparently, my daughter got hold of the camera.

The resort offers a shuttle to/from the water park so that you don't have to worry about parking near the main lodge. Parking is a nightmare, there. We called for the shuttle at 6:20. They told us 5 to 15 minutes. At 6:50 we gave up and drove over to the water park. We got lucky. We found a parking spot almost right way and it was really close to the door.

Avalanche Bay, the water park at Boyne Mountain, is much smaller than the Kalihari Resort we went to a year ago (almost to the day) but it was more fun because the lines were much shorter. They had two body slides where you just lay in a tube and slide down in the water flowing down the slide. They had two slides where you use an inner tube to ride down. One of those is like a giant toilet bowl. The other is a twisty slide that goes outside the building and then back in. They have a lazy river that both of the inner tube slides empty into. They have a couple of hot tubs, a kiddy pool, and a water-basketball area. Oh, they have a racing slide, too. On that one, you slide down on a mat with handles. There are four lanes and a timer to tell you who was the fastest of the four lanes. My personal favorite attraction was the continuous wave machine or flow-zone. Like Kalihari, I didn't take any pictures at the water park because I was having too much fun. Sig never thinks of taking pictures until she sees her camera when we're packing up for the ride home. We were the last people to leave the water park. We weren't there so long as to seem like we were holding up their efforts to close the place, but when we left, I'm sure they locked the doors right behind us.

When we got back to the villa, Bubbles and I went out to play with the snow-skateboard that Mark let us borrow. Elmo came out and gave it a try, too. It's a fun little board, but it's nowhere near as stable as a snowboard. While we were out there playing, Sig was making pancakes for our midnight snack. We devoured about 1/2 of what she made. The rest went into the fridge so they'd be available for breakfast. Getting everyone to go to bed was easy. We were exhausted.

Sunday, the plan was to get up and pack up so we would be ready to check out at 11am, as required. Then, we were going to the tubing park at Boyne Highlands 45 minutes to the north. The tubing park was scheduled to open at 12. Sig and her kids were going to spend the day tubing while Bubbles and I went snowboarding. Then, we would pack up and head home after the snowboarding session ended at 4:30. In theory, that would have gotten us home at 9pm-ish. Unfortunately, the rain had a similar schedule. We did pack up and get checked out by 11 and we did start toward the other mountain. We only got about 1/2 mile before we decided to stop and think things over a bit more. It was really raining hard. We were sure that once we got wet and cold there would be no recovering and we would be miserable. While there was a chance that the rain would clear up or even turn to snow before 4:30, it didn't look very promising. One thing was for sure, though. We had passes for the water park, still. The kids argued hard for going tubing despite the rain. That's how we know they had a blast. Well, that, and the smiles on their faces. However, as we all know, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, so we decided to spend another day splashing away at Avalanche Bay.

The ride home was the kind of typical fun that we seem to always have in the car until the girls started singing a song that is designed to get on your nerves. That is its only purpose and the lyrics even say so. "I know a song that gets on everybody's nerves, everybody's nerves, everybody's nerves. I know a song that gets on everybody's nerves, and it goes like this." They had sung the same song the night before when we were waiting for the shuttle and when they didn't stop despite my pleedings, I escaped to the bathroom to avoid an anxiety attack. I could feel my chest tightening with each verse. When they started singing it in the car, I knew I had no escape and I had to put a stop to it. To do so, I pulled the car to the side of the road and stopped rather abruptly. Perhaps I over reacted. I just knew that I had to stop them immediately. That seemed to do it. Unfortunately, it also killed any fun that we were having in the car. The next hour of the ride was silent. Eventually, Sig pulled out the Deal or No Deal game and things lightened up a bit.

Bubbles and I are going to go back to Boyne on Superbowl weekend for some father/daughter time. Sig said she'll take her kids tubing at least one more time this year, since they had so much fun. We all had fun.