Well, well, well. The end of our journey is almost here. We're happy to report that we've added a visit to Holiday World in Santa Claus, Indiana to the end of our trip. I'd never been to Holiday World before today, so this was all new to me. I had grown up seeing commercials for this place on channel 4 out of Indianapolis, but living closer to Cincinnati, we always went to either Kings Island or Surf Cincinnati for our summer park-based amusement. Jenny, on the other hand, is a life-long fan of this place, and she has told me all about it many times. She used to go all the time with her mom and her brothers, Brian and Caleb, a.k.a. Mr. I don't think the shuttlecock is important.

We got to the park a little later than we had planned, around 2:00 PM, but it wasn't sucha big deal since we'd already decided to step it up and buy the two-day pass. We knew we'd be just fine with a long afternoon on the first day.

The park is a lot bigger than Jenny remembers. They've added so much stuff to the water park portion of Holiday World that we really think we could have spent 100% of our time over there. So we pretty much went straight to Splashin' Safari, rented a locker, and got down to business.

They have some amazing slides! And the really great part is that, to us, everything is new. Everyone else in the park is already bored with the "old" stuff from five years ago, so they're all waiting in the long lines for the hottest slides. We jumped in the lines for Otorongo, for instance, we were slippin' and slidin' in 10 minutes.

My favorite part is the dueling lazy rivers. Yes, the streams that just let you float in a tube around and around and around forever. Wonderful. Jenny is not the biggest fan of just floating all day, so we did keep taking a break from our main lazy river activities to check out the other attractions.

Oh yeah! And the really awesome deal about Holiday World is that your admission price gets you free unlimited soft drinks (or "pop" if you're up there) and unlimited sunscreen. So we always had enough to drink and never got any sunburn. Tada!

After we were sufficiently water-logged, we dried off and went back over to the normal part of the park. We were looking for something to do indoors, so we headed over the the Thanksgiving section of the park to check out a new ride called "Gobbler Getaway". It's a sort of sit-in-the-chair-and-ride-slowly game of LazerTag, but you're tagging the turkey targets with your "turkey call", which is really just a light gun that makes turkey gobbling sounds when you pull the trigger. So you try to shoot these targets, and when you hit one, and turkey pops out from behind whatever the target was mounted to. Pretty fun, like an old school shooting gallery. Jenny destroyed my score, by the way, almost tripling my points.

After being badly beaten at a game that I should certainly be able to handle much better, Jenny had one huge lapse in judgment and agreed to ride a roller coaster with me. A real roller coaster called The Voyage! It's a brand new wooden coaster that holds the world record for the most "weightless" time. The Beast at Kings Island has always been my favorite roller coaster, and I think it may have just been topped. This roller coaster starts with the classic chink-chink-chink-chink up the big hill, then it lets you go and never slows down. It doesn't have to take you back up another hill over and over like some others, and it makes for a seriously intense ride. I had my arms up most of the time, but toward the end, I physically couldn't hold them up anymore. The ride was just way too fast and rough. And it was awesome. Jenny's arm is still bruised from holding my arm so tightly. She won't ride anything else, ever.

Tomorrow is day two of Holiday World! Check back!