Spring Break Road Trip Day 1: Flint, Sulphur Springs, and Paris

I can't recall if I knew about Paris, France before we read the Fancy Nancy and the Boy From Paris book with Riley or if that is when I learned about it, but I do know that I've been mildly (this is up for debate!) obsessed with visiting it for a couple years now!!  An eiffel tower?  With a cowboy hat?  Yes, please!  Take me there!  So when we started thinking about getting away for a few days over Spring Break and I found an indoor waterpark in that general direction, I started dreaming up a road trip itinerary that included Paris, and Roy (being the good husband he is) agreed to it!  We had a general plan in mind, but I agreed to not be my usual crazy planner self and to go with the flow to make sure that the kids had time to do things they were enjoying and to not push us too long in the car!!! I am not a spontaneous person (not even a little bit!), so I couldn't leave it all up in the air, but I stayed flexible and just researched a ton of random ideas so that we could plan each day as it came.  We even waited and booked our hotels on Hotwire each morning before departing the previous one, and I survived to tell the tale!!  Enjoy!

Day 1
Houston - Flint
I knew of two different indoor water parks - Great Wolf Lodge and Schlitterbahn, but since we were making our plan so late, GWL was crazy pricey, Schlitterbahn Galveston was more of a day trip than part of a longer road trip, and Schlitterbahn New Braunfels didn't make the cut because I found a small little indoor waterpark that we decided to check out.  It is part of Silverleaf Resorts The Villages in Flint, TX.  They are open for the general public, so we decided to check it out.

We took our time getting ourselves organize and packed into the car on Wednesday morning.  I packed tons of snacks and lunch for the road.  I also made up the activity envelopes that the kids get on plane trips and long road trips.  I forgot to charge up the portable DVD players, but luckily they had a bit of charge in them.

It took about 3 hours to get to Flint, and we stopped once to stretch our legs and get gas.  We found this really pretty moth, too!

We spent a few hours at the waterpark.  It is a smaller one, and the kids did most of the things on their own.  Roy and I really didn't need to be in our bathing suits, after all!  It was great for the kids (mostly Riley) to experience this smaller waterpark to be super comfortable with everything so that we could go to a bigger one sometime!  There were some smaller slides and a couple bigger ones riley could go on.  There were tube slides that Leighton went on by himself (Riley was 2 inches too short!).  There was also a lazy river and a wave pool.  Riley loved the lazy river and Leighton really enjoyed the tube slides ... even though he kept losing his tube on the way down!!

After the water park, we set off for Suphur Springs.  It was a little under an hour and a half, and I had chosen it as a place to stop for dinner because it was part way to Texas and it also has the only glass walled public toilets in the US!  How is that for fun?!?! The main street and town square were really cute.  I had read good reviews about one restaurant, but they didn't serve burgers (but had everything else you could imagine!) and that is what the kids had asked for.  There were a few places to choose from on the main street, so it wasn't difficult to find burgers.

I had hoped to arrive in Paris after dark so we could see the Eiffel Tower lit up at night and then return in the morning for daytime pictures.  It was about a 35 or 40 minute drive from Sulphur Springs and we arrived in perfect time to see the colorful lights!  Riley was a wee bit disappointed (in the teenage girl annoyed kind of way, and luckily not in the 5 year old tantrum kind of way!) that it wasn't THE Eiffel Tower (she has known forever that this was a smaller one with a cowboy hat on top and that THE Eiffel Tower is in France!), and Roy and Leighton enjoyed teasing me about how small it was.  But I loved it!

We then went to check into the hotel.  I had scored a great deal on the Comfort Inn and Suites for $55 on Hotwire (I almost booked the same hotel through their website for double that and then figured that Hotwire *might* have hotels in Paris - and luckily they did!)!  It was a new and clean hotel.  Perfect for what we needed!

Goodnight from Paris, Y'all!