For those of you not on Facebook, our plan for Spring Break this year was to follow Josh to work in Omaha and hang out at the hotel pool etc. I asked for many suggestions of things that the kids might enjoy doing in the Omaha area, but for the most part we really did just hang out in the hotel. Although, after weeks of telling the kids we were going to Omaha, as it turns out, the hotel Josh stays at is in Council Bluffs! So we had to give him a bit of a hard time about that one. 
We did have a nice room though and our tv had spots to plug in our video camera so we spent a lot of time just relaxing and watching old home movies from when the kids were babies and toddlers. Of course the kids enjoyed the pool!
On St. Patrick’s Day of course we all wore green and Josh took part of the afternoon off so we could go shopping and we took the kids out for a fancy fondue dinner at the Melting Pot. They all tried lobster and filet mignon for the first time and mostly enjoyed it! On our last day there we went to the Children’s Museum. The kids of all ages enjoyed the ball room and the construction zone! Then we found some costumes and sat through a puppet show.
On our way home, we made a detour up to Ames to see Percy Jackson and the Olympians the Lightning Theif. We’d been warned it was not great but the kids wanted to see it anyway. Jacob is reading the book. The movie exceeded my expectations, but Jacob agreed that the book is way way better and therefore the movie stunk. LOL Completely unrelated, yesterday we made the kids swap bedrooms. It was quite an undertaking and I don’t have any pictures yet, but I’ll take some when the process is finished. I do have some pictures of what I did today, here, enjoy!
I’m never gonna get through our whole trip at this rate and I can tell that I’m already forgetting some details! Not that I write all the details anyway, but whatever, moving on! So! When I stopped last time we had just visited the school and all the teachers were asking why they never hear from their American friends anymore. We walked home from school and briefly checked in with Tania before heading out again to be picked up by a friend that I hadn’t heard from or been able to contact since 1996! GALA!!! She and her husband Garik picked us up and drove us to a cafe in nearby Essentuki. Her English was still really good and I learned that she had been a teacher for a while but now she runs a children’s shop in Kislovodsk just up the street from the bazaar! Garik didn’t talk much, but he made sure that we experienced all the best that the cafe had to offer! I know I can’t even remember everything that we ate, but I do have pictures of most of it! After lunch, we drove back to K’vodsk very quickly and Gala showed us the places where we used to picnic and Josh got to experience another Narzan site. We had to get back for our evening plans but we arranged to get together again before our departure.
Gala dropped us off back at Tikhonenkos and we were just in time to catch our next ride! We squeezed into Teacher Tanya Azova’s car along with Alla Dremluga and her now tall teenage son and they drove us to the Castle of Love and Betrayal. Tanya regaled Josh with the story behind the name and now he knows why men say “ladies first!” The whole castle area is much more developed as an “attraction” than I remembered it, but we still had our picture taken on the bridge where all the wedding parties go. It was dusk by now and my camera really doesn’t like taking pictures at dusk so many of my pictures from this trip are blurry. We stopped again for more Narzan and then we headed back into town for some ice cream! We ate at a nice little place right behind the grand theatre overlooking the shopping street below.
am I forgetting anything important?
