Fri, July 17 - Sun, Jul 19th -- Super happy waterpark day

Friday evening kicked off with Friday Evening Laundry (always a bad idea for day-job-ers), followed by sushi dinner with Tanya. It was nice to finally hang out with my Maid of Honor for the first time since our wedding 7 weeks ago. Since she lives 4 blocks from us, we don't really have any excuses.

She came up to our apartment afterwards to play Burnout Paradise with Josh, and then they both gathered around my computer to look at our Niagara Falls/Toronto/Cleveland/Ann Arbor honeymoon photos. It was actually the first time Josh or I had looked at them on a really large screen. One photo in particular of the American Falls was so cool that it immediately became my desktop background (see above: no, that wasn't part of the water park weekend, as tempting as it may seem to ride down).

Saturday, I continued my quest to eat some of my favorite sweetness-containing foods, anticipating the day (today, actually) that I would give up sweetness forever. Hopefully, anyway. As a diabetic, it's about time I try something extreme to assist my health. So we headed to Ann Sathers, an amazing Chicago breakfast restaurant known for their cinnamon rolls. It was good to have the city's best cinnamon roll one last time.

After a trip to Target and Microcenter, we started getting ready for Nap's surprise 40th birthday party at Charlie's Ale House. It turned out to be a casual affair filled with wonderful things such as a metric ton of balloons and streamers, appetizers such as hot wings and quesadillas, and (my last ever piece of) birthday cake. And of course, alcohol. We were probably more surprised to see Nap show up 5 minutes early than he was to see us (bets had been placed on what time he would show, but everyone lost). Later in the evening, Josh and I enjoyed looking at a hand-drawn map from the 1920s or 1930s showing the location of Chicago's gangs. Charlie's Ale House will surely see us haunting their hallways again sometime.

Sunday we woke up early to head to the Raging Waves outdoor waterpark in Yorkville, IL. First, we stopped in Plainfield to have breakfast at Bob Evans restaurant, who continue to have the best pancakes I have ever tasted. Though I usually associate them with roadtrips, it was worth it to go out of our way to visit one in Chicagoland.

We got to Yorkville, which is clearly on former farmland, and surrounded by farms. In spite of this, and in spite of my lifelong Chicagoland resident best friend (Ken) saying they are too far away to be considered "Chicagoland", they do claim Chicagoland, and I found Yorkville on a list of Chicago suburbs on the interwebs. The interwebs never lie!

With highs in the low 70s and lows in the high 50s, this was apparently not the day that all of Chicagoland decided to go to a waterpark in a far flung suburb. Also, it doesn't help that no one seems to have ever heard of them. I've never seen an advertisement for them, and we found them using the almighty Googles. Basically, it's a full size Water Park, but there were 40 cars in the parking lot at most when we got there at about noon. Except for about 2pm through about 4pm, it often felt like there were more employees there than attendees.

Without going into too much of a painstakingly detailed review, I'll just say my overall impression of Raging Waves is that it is fun and clean, but the amenities are minimalistic. For instance, if you're expecting to be able to set your stuff down on something in the changing stalls, such as (oh, I don't know) a bench, you'd be asking for too much. Also, the waves aren't exactly "raging"; maybe it should've been named Ranting Waves instead. Josh put it best when he said "It's like someone invested the bare minimum to make a waterpark, leaving room for expansion if it should take off."

Most of the slides are tube slides in more ways than one: tube shaped and inflated tubes required to ride. After I tried one of the body slides and felt every rivet in the plastic scraping against my back, I realized why the tube slides are more popular. As for the tube shape of all the slides, we figure it's a liability issue. I am used to seeing more slides with partial openings in them. In some cases it made for a very dark ride; in other cases (such as the yellow body slide) I could see everything.

My favorite slide was one that Josh declined: the Boomerang. (See also: Howling Tornado at the Great Wolf Lodge.) Up to 4 people on the same 4-leaf-clover-shaped tube are dropped into a 6 story tunnel and sloshed around. I wish I could say Josh captured video of this, but I didn't even remember to bring my camera. The above photo of us together at the end of the day was taken with Josh's blackberry camera.

Josh's favorite ride was the Lazy River tube ride. For those of you who know him: I'm sure you're not surprised! Unfortunately, we found out later this was the source of his back sunburn, as the sunlight reflected off the bottom of the Lazy River onto his back.

One definite negative about Raging Waves is if you want to ride an innertube in the wave pool, you're going to pay $5 to rent a special wave pool innertube. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. I see this as a safety issue: in fact, we were able to see one of their well-trained lifeguards in action when a girl around 7 years old called for help and found out she couldn't swim in the deep end. We never did see her reunited with her parents, by the way, and can't help but wonder where they were. In any case, she wouldn't have been at such risk for drowning if her parents didn't need to pay for a special wrist band for her to use an innertube.

We rounded out the evening at the Sweet Tomatoes salad bar restaurant in Naperville. Having been to the Schaumburg edition of this chain restaurant several times, I must note that I liked the Naperville one much better. Not so much of a "soccer mom" feeding trough atmosphere.

Having walked around a lot (the water shoes saved us) and climbed stairs 8 times to get to a slide, and also having relaxed quite a bit in the lazy river and the wave pool, I came to the conclusion this is the way life is supposed to be: an interval of movement followed by an interval of relaxation. Lather, rinse, repeat. The not-exactly-moving but definitely-not-relaxing aspect of working in an office (or writing in a blog) is not the way we're meant to spend our lives. We need to have many more moving-relaxing-moving-relaxing days like we had on Sunday.