Anyway, drove up to the west side of Madison, WI yesterday, got into the hotel's parking lot right about at the 3pm check-in time, got our stuff upstairs, then headed down to the water park for 2-3 hours. Went back up, got dried off and changed, went downstairs for "kids eat free" dinner in the restaurant, had a steak ... played in the game room some, went to bed, got up, had the "kids eat free" (me too, they'd given me a coupon when we checked in!) breakfast buffet at crack of dawn, got The Girls into their swimsuits and went back down for another 2 hours of water park before we had to go pack and check out. The Wife had strongly suggested that I take The Girls on a bit of a tour of Madison (so we would be out of her hair all day), so we drove down to the Capitol, wandered around in there for a bit (it is a cool old building, with what I believe to be the second biggest dome after the U.S. Capitol's), then went to the Madison Children's Museum for a bit. After an hour or so in there, both The Girls were complaining of dire hunger, so we went down State St. to see what we could find. Having, unfortunately, written off the Tibetan and Nepali places as stuff they wouldn't eat, we had some hard negotiations and ended up at a very good Mexican place. Once fed, we retrieved the vehicle, and by some miracle ended up making just the right turn away from the Capitol to put us on the right road to get back to the freeway.
While the ride up had been very foggy, the ride back was intermittently rainy. We got back downtown here around 5:30pm, but things were way backed up at our building, so we weren't able to get into the driveway to unload our stuff ... we eventually opted to return the beast (it was an '06 Chevy Equinox that was half the size of a city bus) to Enterprise before they closed at 6pm (requiring us to schlepp all our stuff 4 blocks home).
Anyway, I'm exhausted, but glad to be back home. Now to catch up on my LJFL reading!