Cousins Weekend in Rochester, MN

We took a spring break weekend vacation to Rochester. I know, who goes north for spring break, right?! Either way, the sun was shining and we all had a blast. The group consisted of Renee (with Addison and Brody), Dave & Steph (with Abby, Sydney and Reid), Cousin Greg & Kasey (with Jayden and Joshua) and us! Seven adults and eight kids makes for a rowdy bunch!

We stayed at a hotel with a pool that was great for the older kids. Harper and Reid, well, they weren't exactly sure about the pool. Harper was fine with the environment as long as she wasn't expected to play in the water - but walking laps around the pool was a lot of fun! In addition to swimming, a few of the highlights included...

• Feeding the geese (and ducks!) at Silver Lake. Our group went through at least 6 loaves of bread - those geese were well fed! All of the kids loved seeing the animals and not a single tear was shed during the trip. I should add that poor Reid was sleeping in the car during this trip - poor kid missed the adventure AND the group picture!
• Walking through the mall in the skywalk. Sadly, the mall is much smaller than when we lived there, but we had a great time visiting the Barnes & Noble store that looked like a castle!
• The trip to Barnes & Noble also resulted in Harper's first (and hopefully LAST) time being lost!!! Ross looked away for a moment to listen to Jayden tell him about his new book - and WHAM - she was gone. The adults quickly scattered looking for her...she had made it around 20' and quietly tucked herself into the far corner of the elevator. A backpack (aka known as toddler harness) has since been ordered from Amazon....
• Lunch at Wong's Cafe. Technically, we chose Wong...we went to the 2nd location instead of the restaurant we remember eating at growing up, but the food was still delicious and cheap!
• A tour of the city courtesy of Dave. Since Dave was the oldest, he had the best memories of the city and did a great job driving us past our schools, old house, sledding hill and more!
• Dinner at Broadway Pizza with a group of tired kids! It wasn't a great idea to go out so late, but we all enjoyed some tasty pizza and the kids enjoyed watching the toy train. The most exciting thing at our table (Whittlesey, Cesafsky, and Abby) was the lost bookmark! Immediately upon sitting down, Jayden's new bookmark got swept under the table and it took our group at least 20 minutes to fish it out - good work from Kasey, Abby and Jayden to recover it!

It was a great trip for our family and reminiscent of all the trips we took with our cousins when we were small. It was so successful that I'm pretty confident that there will be many more in the future!