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Jan 20, 2024

Midway Ice Castles

I was looking for a fun winter activity to take the kids to and stumbled upon the Ice Castles. It was something I always wanted to take them one day and we had just bought the kids good snow gear (boots, coats, hats, gloves, etc.) so I figured why not? Larry and I had gone a handful of years ago.


I was trying to decide if we should do night tickets (because they are lit up at night) or more during the day (when it wouldn't be as cold). After picking the date I saw only afternoon tickets were available, so that solved that issue. I decided to get tickets for 2:30 so the kids could get their nap in on the drive.


It was supposed to rain all day, luckily it was very light once we got there and didn't even start hard raining until we left. It was a little early and I realized we didn't do a bathroom run before it so we stopped at a bathroom stop nearby. It ended up being one of those "hole in the ground with a white semi seat on top of it" sort of bathroom. The girls were horrified and refused to even try and go to the bathroom haha. When we got out they kept saying it was the most disgusting bathroom they've seen haha. I made sure they didn't touch anything and I sanitized the crap out of my hands (because I did have to go, so I had to touch things anyways...it was so cold the toilet paper was frozen haha) when we got back to the van. After that we drove up to this lodge close to the castle entrance and had the girls try and go there (wish I had known of that before the gross bathroom experience that I'm sure I'll get some sort of disease from haha). After that we walked to the entrance and decided to try our luck at getting into the castles a little early...which worked.



They had so many cute photo ops there, but you had to pay for those so we just took our own. Although, they did have a Darth Vader and Storm Troopers there that was tempting, just for some fun. We walked through about half the castles and then decided to get hot chocolate (I told the girls we could get some and Lucy kept saying we forgot it, so halfway through I decided lets just get some so it can be done by the time we finish). Poor Lucy drank it too quickly, I forgot to tell them to wait, and burned her mouth and seemed traumatized from that experience. Cara burned her mouth a little and started grabbing snow from around the castles (not OFF them, to be clear) to help cool her mouth off. Once she grabbed it from the ground I put a stop to that!



This year they had a slide so I took the older girls on that (Lucy was too nervous to go since you couldn't ride on laps). It was a lot of fun, they had helpers there to get the girls set up on their own, and Cara screamed the whole way down. Once we were done, so was Pierce, he was crying and just so cold that we decided it was time to call it quits (we had been there for an hour at this point). We had parked a ways away so I told him to take Pierce and go get the car and I'll let the girls wander a little more (they were not ready to go home). We found this little kid play area that I let the girls play through for a bit and then we headed back to the car.



The drive up and down was so pretty, some of the waterfalls were frozen and some were still running so it was so cool to see. Overall, it was a really fun experience. Cara and Gwen were even saying it was the best day ever and was just as much fun as Legoland haha. I'm just glad they were happy. We mostly finished the hot chocolate, so at least that wasn't a total waste haha. 

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