Marilyn's Travel Blog: Ingredients for a Memorable Family 4th!

Our friends are starting to roll their eyes at us when the camera comes out.
"Is this gonna make the blog?" they ask.
Of course it is! After all, it involved traveling...

This time we headed up to Spokane to Mary Kay and Gary's cabin on the Pend Oreille river. (I don't know...it's french. They pronounce it Pondoray) Actually, the cabin was past Spokane in a cute little town called Newport at the Idaho border. The last time we were there it was November so we celebrated Thanksgiving and my fiance's birthday and went shopping the next day for my wedding dress. That was 16 years ago. Ouch! Has it been that long?! I remember very vividly how much snow there was and how i shivered in a sleeping bag on the floor all night only to hear dad complain in the morning that he was so hot up in the loft that he'd kept the window open all night! Dads!

But in the years since then we've heard tales of summertime. Tales about bugs and bats and jet skis and Gary's margerita's... so when we heard there was a July 4th invitation...we packed the car.

Apparently the Spokane area is a good place to spend the 4th. I've heard from more than one source that the fireworks you can get from the Indian Reservation are unbeatable. My sources were good. Scott gave us a fantastic show. We discovered that some of those really good ones will even explode under water! That was our favorite thing. We ended up putting holes in the rubber raft from the sparks, but didn't kill any fish or start any fires that i know of! The neighbors might have though :-).

If you read our blog, there's some chance you have family and that you like to vacation with them. We do too...obviously. And here are some of our reccomendations for really great families and great vacations.

1. Have a cabin somewhere on the water.
in lieu of the cabin, you could also have really incredible, long-time friends with a great sense of humor whose kids you grew up with and are in many ways closer than your own family because they've just always been there with you...even when you went shopping for your wedding dress...and they could be the ones with the cabin. That was our approach.)

2. Have a jet ski for the water.

be prepared to pull the kids around a lot. Or you could have your older brother do it and he could flip the Jetski with 2 kids out in the middle of the current and float downriver a mile or two before he got it flipped back and then be unable to get it started again so that you have to ask the neighbors to take you out with their boat on a search and rescue mission. That works fine too.)

3. There should also be some brothers and their friends and a little girl to pick flowers and think the bugs are gross.
(or maybe the little girl could talk the boys into swimming out to the island in order to bring back golf ball sized pollywogs in a plastic ziploc so that she could gross out all the moms instead.)