Meeting Devon in Hays

Last weekend we met Nancy, Carlos, and Devon in Hays, KS. Wow!! What a town! We stayed at the Holiday (now renamed the Helliday) Inn. I have not stayed in such a crappy motel for let's see....um 13 years? Darin and I stayed at a real gem when we drove across the country to med school.....and this Helliday Inn ranks right up there. It was the strangest place. It was like a motel that they built walls around to turn it into a hotel. The rooms had windows that looked out into hallways that were hotter than hell (that would be the hallways, the rooms were about the same temp as hell). The rooms had 'air conditioners' that I am pretty sure were trial models for when ac was invented. The first room that we checked into the ac didn't work. It turned on for a few minutes, made a loud clunking sound, and then turned warm for a while. So, we moved to a nonsmoking room that smelt suspiciously of smoke. The ac 'worked' in this room and kept the room at an uncomfortable sleeping temp of 80+ degrees. Well, at least they had a great pool with a waterslide...oh that was just in the photos? The pool did have a waterslide and looked great from a distance. However, on closer inspection I can't imagine what types of diseases could be contracted if it weren't for the 5 million gallons of chlorine. The kids swam for a while, we went back and sanitized ourselves in the shower, ate pizza, and dealt with the boys becoming blind from the chlorine in their eyes. The boys went to sleep early because their eyeballs were burning out of their heads. We finally all drifted off to a sweaty sleep dreaming of checkout time!

The next morning we went to breakfast -with the rest of Hays, seeing how it was Father's Day. Then we went to a park, captured some cute photos there, and then to the Sternberg Dinosaur Museum, which the kids really enjoyed. We brought Devon back to Colorado Springs with us for a fun filled week!