Couer D'Alene Page 2

I have been having tons of problems this morning with the blog, not sure what is going on, so I apologize if things look formatted oddly.

Let's get back to Couer D'Alene.  I had wanted to add to the last page that Ben also enjoyed some tubing on his own.  The plus of that was he could face forward and we could see his smiling face while he was tubing - priceless.  Dan and Wendy have one grandchild who is 4 and not quite tubing yet, so they just loved seeing the smiles and hearing the joyful screams of our kids.

The other adventure of Day 1 was for some odd reason I decided to try water skiing for the first time.  I guess being away from corporate America for 5 weeks makes all your rationale thinking go away :)

I am a so-so downhill skier, so I really didn't know how I would do.  Dan gave me the basic instructions and everyone kept saying, just don't go up to quick, gradually do it.  I actually got the hard part quite easily, or so they tell me.  I sat back and got myself out of the water smoothly, the issue was I could not stand up, just couldn't pull myself out of the water completely.  We realized afterwards that we forgot to put gloves on me, so maybe that didn't help, who knows.  I did "get out of the water" as you can see from the picture below - which to me means I did it, just didn't get that sense of being pulled by a very quick boat over water.  But knowing my lack of adrenaline in my body, that is probably a good thing, and I think the kids were proud of mom.

The kids also lounged around the "beach" area by the house, did some sun bathing, snorkeling to look at the fish and fishing of their own.  This area is shared by 10 houses who sit up on the hillside, so they all share a beach area where the boats are docked and you can safely swim and so forth.  We met some really great people who are their neighbors, everyone was so friendly and their dogs welcomed Henry too.

As you can see, Ben is as white as his mommy, and thank god for sunscreen on that one!  That evening we boated over to one of the bays on the South end of the lake for dinner, before heading to another bay for fireworks the evening of the 3rd.  It was cool to see all those boat lights at night on the lake, a bit scary but I knew Dan would get us home safely.  Here are some pics of the fireworks.

It was quite an impressive fireworks display for a bay in a lake, I am guessing all the homeowners pitch in and it was the equivalent to a township in cincinnati for sure!





That evening Wendy's son Jake and his girlfriend arrived, so the kids were even more excited.  On the 4th we lounged around a bit and then decided to take a tour of the lake, heading to the North end which is where the city of Coeur D'Alene sits.  There is a very large hotel/resort, famous golf club and one of the bays close to downtown is where the "celebs" live.  Dan knows who owns many, but not all of the houses.  Some of these thing were UNREAL!  I took pics of John Elways place (he was there playing that game where you toss rope with beanbags on it), and Dennis Franz (NYPD fans out there) house.  I liked his the best, you can tell he lives there year round vs. only as get-away place like Elway's.  Downtown was great, very cute and we had our first Pita Pit experience, I think I want to bring the franchise to Cincy.  The kids posed with their town mascot the moose.

This is Elways above, and Franz's below

That night we sat down by the lake and just watched all the fireworks being set off by homes, it was unreal how many there were, no need to go to town for sure.  It was a fantastic 3 days and we were sad to go but very excited for our next stop- Yellowstone.  Arnie and I had been to Yellowstone in 1999 and loved it and we couldn't wait to show the kids.  We will have 4 days there, including two with our friends the Coldiron's, so the kids can't wait to see familiar friendly faces from Cincinnati.