Dunes, water parks, and fun!!!

What a great week we had this week!

After our Tuesday excursion on the helicopter...we followed it up with a trip up north to Silver Lake Sand Dunes to ride the Mac Dunes Scooters...

This was quite an adventure! We went with about 20 other staff from Maranatha on a school bus about an hour away...
And obviously, we took some pretty silly pictures...

Silver Lake Dunes are one of the largest living dunes in the country...This means that they are still moving around every day...There are parts that don't move anymore, but it seriously looked like the desert...Jason asked if they filmed any good movies there, and they said yes...but couldn't name any movies they knew...
The Mac Dunes Scooter Rides were so fun! On top of a bit of fun information about the area, this "scooter" took us on a thrilling ride over the dunes, with beautiful views, splashing in Lake Michigan, and a view of the public area where many off-road vehicles were zooming around on their own...Afterwards, we went to the Whippy Dip, a local ice cream stand and got gigantic and wonderful specialty flurries to tide us over until dinner....

Friday night in Teens we did a "staff hunt" which means the kids are sent off to find staff members who are hiding (either literally hiding or disguised) on the the grounds of Maranatha. As you can see, some of us had some fun with this, and definitely got a little silly with the whole thing.

I'm the one with the purple hat. Jason told me I was going to be one hot old lady, which made me feel a little better about one day "going gray."
And then there was Saturday...What a fun day! There is a family who lives at Maranatha who just recently opened a water park in Illinois, about an hour west of Chicago. Their daughter works on our teen staff and they so graciously invited us to join them for a day at this awesome park! I was definitely in for more than what I expected...This place had 10 water slides! Some were free fall, others had tubes, one was like a toilet bowl (you went around and around and around) and one was called the boomerang...You went down this tube into a huge bowl-like thing, and then you went back and forth and back and forth until you finally spurted out into a pool.

This place was awesome! There was a lazy river (the 7th largest in the US), a huge wave pool...and a great mouse-trap-looking play area for kids...It was a great day to act like a kid and play like a kid...to get to know our staff and to be blessed by Maranatha...Getting into this park for the day, getting to drive the Maranatha van all the way to Illinois, having a place to "retreat" in a way with our staff was so fun and relaxing!

So this has been a great week! And we're looking forward to the next one!