Mason isn’t really scared of anything outdoors and was able to jump right off the cliff. I don’t know exactly how high the cliff is, but I would say about 20 feet. He just kept jumping off and climbing back up to jump off again.

The bad news is that I also jumped in, which would have been fine had I remembered to take off my wedding ring. But sometime between the time I jumped in and the time I climbed out my ring disappeared into the depths of the American Falls Reservoir. But the ring has plans of its own. I suspect it will lay there for thousands of years until perhaps some creature shall scoop it up and keep its new “precious”.

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 I got to eat them all.

What to do? I guess I could have let it melt, but I didn’t want to release all that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so I thought I would just put the dry ice in bottles and let it melt inside the bottles, where it would not be released and add to global warming. I was shocked when these bottles exploded, which we videotaped.

I also used the dry ice to try to freeze off a wart…I’ll see how that works. It did hurt and is getting smaller so after a few more days maybe it will be gone.

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 bone would occur, but we escaped without much incident. Whitney was able to climb to the very top of the course on her first try, which was pretty amazing. She did a great job, and Mason did as well.

We cooked up some prickly pears but they didn’t taste very good. The big difference was that in Virginia, when we go camping all we need is a sheet to cover up with. But Idaho can get cold at night, and luckily Steve had good sleeping bags for the kids.

The next day we found yet another pile of rocks (can you believe that) and the kids played dragons on them. Whitney was also trying to attract a chipmunk to her, which eventually ate out of her hand. She also found some obsidian which was pretty cool.

Mason had found a piece of steel square tubing and thought the fire would melt it. I didn’t think it would, and when he wondered how they did it in the olden days I told him they used a bellows to pump more air into the furnace and make it hotter. So he came back with an air pump that we used to use to pump up air mattresses, and I found a hollow tent pole to focus the air into the fire. We got the coals white hot and were able to smash the steel tubing pretty good. We don’t have a sword yet but maybe one day we will.

I also added some other pictures of Mason. I went into his bedroom to turn off his music and found that he had figured out a neat method of holding his iPod. Also, I don’t understand how he sleeps with so much junk in his bed.

The weather was pretty nice; it wasn’t too hot or cold but was kind of windy. We walked down the path by the canal and by several locks. Eventually we veered off the path and down into the rocks by the river. The kids (we had Abby that day so there were three kids) had a lot of fun climbing and scrambling on the boulders.

Eventually we found Billy Goat Trail. It is almost 5 miles long, and can be quite tricky in places. Of course Mason loved it, but the girls did pretty good as well. Whitney had a pretty bad fall when she was heading down a slippery slope of rock, tripped and almost went facefirst into a rock but somehow she stopped herself.

We ate a little lunch while taking a break about halfway through the trail and made it back to the car, which was about 1 miles too far away, cause they kids were really dragging. Between the Billy Goat Trail and the other trails we went on it was a lot of walking even for me. Pictures follow the break.

Whitney and Heidi’s was more traditional, with a beautiful blue lake and a cute dog and lots of pretty icicles. It also had a very nice wreath over the front door.

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. So 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 there were oil rigs on the horizon, adding to our domestic supply of oil. But the world is not a perfect place, so we just swam in the ocean and walked up and down the beach.

Then we went back to sea before landing at Nassau, in the Bahamas. The last time we were there we just got off the ship and started walking around town. That was pretty fun, but this time we took a taxi over to Atlantis and staked out a place on the beach. The waves were huge, as you can see in the video, and the water was very warm. The temperature was warm also. After a while, we just started walking down the beach toward one end that looked at little more private. We got to a little outcropping of rock that sheltered the water and calmed the waves. Although we didn’t bring our snorkeling gear, we should have because there were tons of fish in that area. A herd of yellow and black fish stalked us for a while and it was pretty neat.

We followed that up with an exciting evening aboard the boat. It was probably more exciting for the heavy drinkers, who seemed to be losing their heads. At one point a lady asked me if the drummer in the band that was playing was my son. The drummer was probably 35. And black.

We then went on to Freeport, took another taxi to another beach and hung out there most of that day before getting back on board the boat to start the long trip home.

Cruises are a lot of fun, and we look forward to another trip. As you can see from the pictures, the ocean and sky are pretty and the beaches are great. We also made sure to take pictures of all the towel animals for Whitney, who was very interested in that.