The Price of Oil and Vacations

Just about every year our family ventures down to southern Indiana to attend the Holiday World/Splashin' Safari amusement and water park in Santa Claus, Indiana. That's right. It's located in Santa Claus, Indiana. In fact, the park used to be called "Santa Claus Land". I know that some of you Big Doofus readers are familiar with this place. It's an awesome park that's very family friendly. They have world-class rides and the water park is first rate.

But instead of spending all of our money on park tickets and gas, we decided to stay close to home this year. I'm sure that the kids will not let us get away with this every year, but it was great in '08. We visited the Plainfield Aquatic Center only ten minutes from our house. Sure, it's no Splashin' Safari, but the pools were huge with three cool slides, diving boards, indoor basketball and games, etc. If we lived in the city limits of Plainfield, we would have saved a few more bucks. But everyone had a blast with the exception of my 14 year old boy (and that was his own choosing).

We left the park at 4:30 and headed to downtown Indy for dinner at The Old Spaghetti Factory. When I first moved to Indy in 1991 this was about the only restaurant destination downtown. That's all different now with downtown being so incredibly vibrant, but The Old Spaghetti Factory is a nice, affordable place to eat. We had a reservation for all 16 of us so we didn't even have to wait for our table--perfect. I walked out to the waiting area for a bit and got to hold my youngest nephew for a few minutes while his daddy visited the bathroom. That's where this picture was taken. He's a very mommy-attached boy, so you take ANY opportunity you can get to bond with him--and I think we did that a bit. He was either REALLY interested in me here or just cannot get over my weird beard or big nose.

We ended the evening with the 10:00 pm showing of WALL-E. Yes, that's a very late time to start a movie, but we all managed to stay awake through most of it. I'd seen it already and loved it the second time (and didn't feel guilty about dozing off for five to ten minutes in the middle). You should all go out and see this movie. It's great for so many reasons, but I'll spare getting into it as it was covered very well by Timothy Power in his "Sometimes I'm Actually Coherent" blog (one of my new favorites along with Arby's Archives).