summer fun: darien lake

One of the perks of all the car shopping we did this summer was that a local chain of dealerships gave away tickets to a local amusement park for taking a test drive. Two test drives got us four free admission tickets to Darien Lake, which is about a 45-minute drive from our house. We'd never taken the kids to an amusement park, at least not at ages where they could fully enjoy everything the park had to offer, so we prepared ourselves for a day full of fun.

One of the first things we did at the park was to go on the ferris wheel. It's a pretty big ferris wheel, and poor Evan was terrified:

The top of the ferris wheel gave us a great view of the park, which even Evan eventually admitted was pretty cool, once we convinced him to open his eyes a little bit:

After the ferris wheel, Evan had no qualms about any of the rides. In fact, he was often disappointed because he didn't meet the height requirement for a lot of the rides. He was so eager to go on rides that while James and Greg did something for tall people, he opted to do a few rides by himself. I was told in no uncertain terms that I did not need to ride with him:

The favorite ride of both kids turned out to be the bumper cars, which they rode several times:

That is, the bumper cars were their favorite until we got to the water park. Thanks to an unusually cool summer, the day was not as warm as you'd ordinarily find in upstate New York in July, but that didn't stop our water monkeys. James spent a long time trying to master this climbing course over the water, and nearly made it:

Most of the time they just played in the water, climbing and splashing:



After about 8 hours of sun and water and play, we took the scenic route home and discovered a great pizza place in a small town along the way:

This pizza place had amazing deep-dish pizza loaded with delicious goodness:

Three-quarters of the family fell asleep on the ride home, full and exhausted and happy. We'll definitely be going back again, and hopefully Evan will be tall enough next time that none of us will have any disappointment in an otherwise perfect day.