Middle of the Week Holiday Report

I've determined that middle of the week holidays are not good if you have to go back to work the next day. We celebrated the 4th of July with a day at Spring Valley Beach in Blountsville, AL. We'd never been there before, but decided to try it since it takes us almost as long to get across the county to Splash Beach Water Park. We got there are 10:30am and there was a line of cars waiting to get in. It took us about 15 minutes to get into the park, but we finally made it in.

We had taken our pop-up tent to keep the sun off of us while we were eating our picnic lunch and so had everyone else. There was room to park all of our stuff and lay the towels out, but all of the tent space was taken. So, we braved the sun with lots of Coppertone Kids Sunscreen, SPF 50.

This water park has a very large pool with four large slides, two baby slides and a kids play area all encompassed in it. It still has plenty of room for others to swim without it being too crowded. To begin with, the girls were content to play in the little kid area, but then I took Shelby to the large slide and that was it. Gracie took her first slide down a water slide and loved it! She's not much on having her head go completely underwater, but she got completely submerged three or four times.

It was about 4:30 or so when we left yesterday afternoon and headed towards Pell City to watch the fireworks over the river. We stopped at Golden Rule for the traditional 4th of July bar-b-que and then continued on our journey. We got to the Pell City park and found the Kids Kastle play area. The girls wanted to immediately go play, but we had to nix that until they ate dinner. They reluctantly ate just enough to get down and go.

After playing on the very large playground, we headed to find our seat for the fireworks show. And so did the ants. They were everywhere! We walked over a bridge to the other side of the lake where some ballfields were and found bleachers to sit on. Not the best seats, but better than the ground with the ants.

The fireworks started at 9pm and the show was good. But the best part was hearing the comments from my two beautiful girls. Shelby talked about the "fairy dust" fireworks that she really liked (our daughter associates fireworks with Disney World instead of Independence Day) and Gracie would shout out the colors of each one as it exploded. The finale was something that you would expect to see in Disney with all of the colors and explosions.

Getting home took a little while last night. I think we pulled into the driveway at 10:30p.m. The girls had a lot of fun, but we are all dragging today. Thank goodness the 4th falls on a Friday next year!!