One Reason Why a Wisconsin Dells Trip is so Expensive

One thing I learned on my trip to the Dells this past Thanksgiving weekend, although it has nothing to do with Thanksgiving or the Dells, is that Dippin' Dots are positively the biggest waste of money on the face of the earth. Almost five bucks for what amounts to a large scoop of ice cream.

Actually, I've known what a rip off they are since I visited the Minnesota Zoo a few years ago, but it finally sunk in because I was, up to that point, proud of how well I was sticking to a budget for the Dells trip. I don't get it. The texture isn't as enjoyable as hand-dipped ice cream, and the kids spill about half of them. I'm hoping even young kids will wise up and these things will go the way of the Pet Rock. At least at that price.

Wisconsin Dells Thanksgiving

It was a nice, long Thanksgiving break, and I kind of wish I had tomorrow off from work. I think an ideal vacation is one where you get whatever time off spent doing whatever you do on the vacation, then get one day at home to unwind.

My wife and I took our two little guys to Wisconsin Dells, just getting ahead of the nasty weather, last Wednesday. It was my ex-wife's Thanksgiving to have the three older kids, so to make up for what they missed out on, we plan on heading back for President's Day weekend with them. It was also my first Thanksgiving away from them for the entire weekend, that I can recall anyway.

For President's Day, we will probably find a nice resort with a water park built in. This past five-day weekend, we rented a timeshare, which was fine, and had nice facilities, but we had to drive to get to the amusement and water parks. That wasn't so bad, but with five kids along for the trip next time, for convenience's sake, we'll try to stay where there is all that stuff on-site. Another key factor is that it will be more like a three-day weekend, so to cram as much in, it will help to not have to drive around as much.

We'll also need to find something better to travel in than my old Ford Taurus wagon with 120,000 miles on it. If all goes well, and my wife gets one of the jobs she is interviewing for this week, we'll be able to get a minivan. I couldn't justify it otherwise, despite the alternative - seven of us packed like sardines for 3 1/2 hours.

Here's hoping...

Elections

This being my first post since the election, I suppose it would be appropriate that I comment on how badly the Democrats got beat. I won't profess to know why it happened, but I do believe it had a lot to do with a lot of people being impatient. I also believe it had a lot to do with the success of the right wing media to get people to believe crazy things, at least to enough of a degree to affect votes.

Take the untrue $200 million-per-day Obama trip to Asia, for example. Although the story came out too late to affect the election, it's testamentary to how people are willing and capable of believing some crazy stuff. Then, after presented with the evidence, they'll still either believe it because they want to, or, almost as bad, believe something along the lines of, "Well, it may not be that bad, but there's still a lot of truth to it."

And when you get a lot of folks in the media from the same camp repeating the story as true because "they heard it in the media," even though they are only hearing it from each other, the uninformed fall for it, and in large numbers.

While this does happen with all political "sides," the Right Wing pretty clearly had the lion's share of successful indoctrination of misinformation this go-round.