Holidays and Vacations


One of the highlights of every trip to Idaho is the trip to Craters of the Moon. We have been going there for many years and always have fun looking at the rocks and playing in the caves. This year we made a slight detour to EBR-1, which is where nuclear power was first used to power a lightbulb (which is still on display). It is a lot of fun and the kids had a good time there. They got to play with the manipulators and pretend they were handling radioactive waste. It was a pretty interesting place and fun to go to when there aren’t a lot of other people there.

Finally, we finished our trip by eating at Pickles Place, where you can get deep fried pickles. I made the kids try them but neither were terribly impressed, which I was OK with because then (more…)

On our recent trip to Idaho, the first activity after arrival and resting was to go camping at City of Rocks. We had never been there before, but Steve and his family go all the time and they really like it. Both Mason and Whitney like to rock climb–or at least practice rock climbing–and were dying to try the real thing.

We got there and got set up and then went to work having fun. Mason and Seth and Caleb tried to stick smoking sticks down vole holes in the ground to “smoke them out” and very few square inches of skin got burned in the process.

We climbed up to the top of a big pile of rocks, where I was sure that at least one broken (more…)

Me and Heidi decided to go on a cruise for an anniversary vacation. We had gone on a cruise before, and had a very good time, but the last time we cruised out of Orlando so had to drive all the way down there and all the way back. This time, we found a seven day cruise out of Baltimore for about the same price as the other cruise a couple years ago.

We started out on the first day, Sunday, in Baltimore and started heading south. Our first stop was in Orlando, but we wouldn’t be there until Wednesday morning. Full PostSo we spend the first two and a half days at sea. The water was pretty choppy at first, but it didn’t make either of us sick. We had a very good time all the way down. Our boat was the Carnival Pride, which is a very nice boat and we had a balcony, which we slept out on one night. The food was really good, and we each bought an all you can drink pop card. I figured out how many pops we needed to drink each day in order to break even so I drank at least that many each day.

We got to the beach in Orlando, which is very nice but would be a lot better if (more…)

Over the Columbus Day weekend, we celebrated the discovery of America by discovering a new camping spot, Belle Isle State Park, or “Bell Al” park as the natives would say. We set up our camp in good time. The kids both brought capes, so they each had assistance from capes. We went on several hikes. The paths at Belle Isle aren’t very difficult; they are mostly tractor roads. But they are quite deserted and scenic.

Sunday night a fellow camper gave a presentation on astronomy, and brought along a powerful telescope. We all got to see the moons of Jupiter and a galaxy that is the farthest object visible. Mason was hoping it was the Star Wars galaxy.

We also went out along the river bank and on the way back found a copperhead snake that had recently been run over. So, we did what Columbus would have done and ate it. Seriously, we ate roadkill. At least (more…)

So for Fathers Day I got one of these: from my Amazon Wish List. It is awesome. I also realized that homemade ice cream is really just flavored butter that is frozen. Seriously, half a cup of the batch I made has 450 calories. Its just cream…frozen…into ice. I wonder where they got the name. We also had a very good meal for Fathers Day and I had a good day.

Anyway, I’ll use it a lot. Mason likes sherbet so I will have to try that as well. Here are some kind of Fathers Day pictures…

This year for Easter we didn’t go anywhere exciting but it was pretty busy. The kids made me jump on the trampoline with them, hollow out eggs and paint them and make S’mores with Peeps and Easter candy. They were very good.

The Easter bunny hid their eggs and they had fun looking for them, and the weather was at least sunny, but not very warm. We (more…)

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