BUSCH GARDENS!!

The Busch family of parks does an amazing thing. Once a year military families can play at one of their parks for free! Each year we get four free tickets to any of their parks. I cannot say how much we appreciate this!! On June 1st we decided to surprise the kids. We hit the road and didn't even tell them where we were going. Boy were they thrilled when we pulled into the parking lot!! In the fall of 2010 we decided to pull the kids out of school and homeschool them (that's a discussion for a different post). This means we have some freedom, which meant we could go to the park when the rest of Virginia was still in school! It was a fantastic day and we can't wait to go again next year!!

When we arrived each of the boys were measured and given a wrist band so that we could easily identify the rides that were height appropriate for them. Sam and Ethan were thrilled to find out that they were tall enough to ride a few roller coasters!

Ethan

Sam ~ Almost tall enough to not need to be measured. I bet next year he will be able to ride everything.

Gabe

Joel

I was determined to ride every ride in the park. Why not?! There were no lines!!

The train.

Greg doesn't do rides that spin, guess who got pretty dizzy that day!

Abby, patiently waiting for her brothers to finish riding rides.

I bought Joel a cooling fan to play with, he had to do a lot of waiting around too.

We finally found a ride that was just his size!

New to us this year, was the Sesame Street area for the little kids. Abby and Joel loved the water park!

Abby also loved the Sesame Street show!

Too much excitement!

Sam's favorite roller coaster, Apollo's Chariot!

As you can see from the picture above we totally shut down the park! The parking lot was basically empty by the time we rolled out. One of the best things we did was to purchase "meal plans" on the Busch Garden website the night before. The whole day ended up costing us a little over $200 (for food, drinks, two souvenir photos and for one ticket, Abby and Joel were free, we had four free tickets but did have to pay for one child), but I'd say we got a bargain. I can't wait until next Spring!! Stay tuned for the two souvenir photos we had done HIL-AR-IOUS!!