Fire

Little Lake Santa Fe.  We go there every year, sometimes twice a year.  This year, there was some excitement.  We watched smoke rise from the trees for about 20 minutes before something struck us as odd.  Initially, we assumed it was a brush fire.  People burn stuff on their property all the time and nobody takes notice.  But the smoke just didn’t seem to let up.

Picture one, 1:36 p.m. when we decided something was not right:

Fire 1

We kept on tubing and having fun, looking over to see if there were any changes.  By this time, people were starting to drive their boats over to watch.  Suddenly, we notice a huge change in the smoke.

Picture 2, 1:41 p.m.:

Fire 2

The smoke had become very black.  We assumed they had a brush fire gone wrong, and headed over on the boat to take a look.

This is what we saw.

Pictures 3 and 4, 1:48 p.m.:

Fire 3

Fire 4

About the time we saw the very black smoke, we also started to hear fire engines.  The smoke had been showing in the sky for over 20 minutes.  At home, there is no way anyone would have waited to call the fire department.  In this area, however, smoke is a normal thing.  The first thing you assume is someone is burning their brush.  The other weird thing was that we drove the boat past there once, before the flames showed, and people seemed to be outside looking around the house as if something weren’t right.  But it was a solid 20 minutes before the sirens could be heard.

The Gainesville Sun reported the fire the following day, but they didn’t have much more information than we had:

Cause of house fire on Little Lake Santa Fe Unknown

Ooooh big excitement for a little town.  I’m feeling really bad for the people who own the house.

August 6, 2008 | Filed Under Trips and Travel | 4 Comments 

The Calm After The Storm

So, after the scary skies, we had the most beautiful sunset! This picture taken perhaps 1 hour after the scary sky picture!

Sunset After Storm

And then all good things must come to an end, and we returned home. The ride was mostly uneventful, which is amazing for a 5 hour drive with three small boys. I never thought I’d EVER say this, but thank God for Nintendo DS. And if we could figure out a way to put invisible shields between the kids, we could trade our 20 mpg (highway, but only 14 city) car for something more fuel efficient. The kids think that everything has been invented that can be invented (didn’t someone famous say that about 150 years ago?), but I think there is still money to be made here.

But all is well when you can leave home for a week and come home to this:

Strawberry Heaven

May 27, 2008 | Filed Under Trips and Travel, Fun Stuff | 3 Comments 

Scary Sky

So the sky last night was scary, but really neat at the same time.  I love the beach.

NC Sky

May 21, 2008 | Filed Under Trips and Travel | 8 Comments 

National Park Week

It’s National Park Week and Child’s Play has tagged me for her meme to write about a National Park that I love. She’s particularly interested in Virginia. I could write about so many great and well-known national parks in this area, but I decided to write about a little-known park that is near and dear to my heart.

Fort Hunt Park in Alexandria, Virginia, was originally built to protect Washington, DC during the Spanish American War. About two years ago, however, a more nefarious use as a World War II Nazi interrogation center came to light. Follow the links in this Wikipedia article for some very interesting reading.

I grew up in a neighborhood very close to this park, and we played here all the time. Back then, though, the forts were all covered with overgrowth and the openings had not been blocked off. We used to take flashlights and explore. Of course, those were the days when kids would leave the house in the morning with the promise of being home for lunch or by dark with no mention of exactly what they would be doing! As I grew older (late 1970s, early 1980s), this park was our hang out place. They have since closed the section of the park where most of the “hanging out” went on though, and they’ve even renumbered the remaining sections so people don’t even realize there was another section.

For us now though, Fort Hunt Park is the ultimate place to play. The old forts have been uncovered and the kids love to climb on them and explore the parts that are open. A couple of weeks ago, they even got to look inside a previously inaccessible section of the main fort because someone had broken through the barriers.

I wish I had more pictures to share, but I never seem to have my camera with me when we go.

April 2003

Fort Hunt 1

Fort Hunt 5

Fort Hunt 2

Fort Hunt 6

October 2007

Fort Hunt 3

Fort Hunt 4

Fort Hunt 7

April 17, 2008 | Filed Under Trips and Travel | 9 Comments 

Men are from Mars

As the 6th girl in a family of 6 girls, sometimes I marvel at the things boys do.

We went to Great Wolf Lodge this week for a couple of days with our homeschool group. This is how boys say goodbye to each other:

Pile of Boys

You might think this is a novelty, or something they just chose to do this once. But no. The pile of boys is a regular occurrence with this crew. It seems weird to me — or is it just that I am from Venus?

Boys at Great Wolf

December 5, 2007 | Filed Under Trips and Travel, Fun Stuff, Parenting | 4 Comments 

Making up for lost wine…

OK. OK. So the saying is a little different than that. However, I’ve been away at a family camp (homeschool) since Sunday and it was alcohol free. Normally that wouldn’t be a big deal, but in this case, well, I could have used a drink!

The camp was GREAT! The kids had a blast. The coordinator of the camp must pretty much give up her entire life for several weeks prior to and during this event. It was the most amazing example of a cooperative effort that I have ever seen. Kudos to Dee Dee!!

The thing I am NOT used to is being around about 60+ children at the same time for 4 full days. Yikes. I thought my three boys were a handful! Apparently I haven’t been around much.

We escaped with one bee sting, one humiliating “pantsing” episode, and one band-aid. The last item being a true miracle given the slope of the paths and the speed of the scooters! I’m sure that given a few weeks, I will be remembering this camp as the best thing we ever did. But at this moment, I’m still recovering — thanks to my Argentinian malbec.

In this photo, we are making sushi (that’s me with the sunglasses on my head, because you never know when the sun might get too bright indoors). The boy to my right in orange is Alvin (8), and to my left in light blue is Theodore(6), and across from me in orange is Simon (10):

Sushi

I’ll bet that just looks like so much fun! It was. We went through about 100 sheets of nori, which means a shit-load of sushi for dinner. It was a most amazing sight. There were two tables full of ingredients (tuna, salmon, imitation crab, cucumber, avacado, carrots, sauteed sweet potatoes, grilled red peppers, creamed cheese, spring onions, etc.). The more amazing thing was that it was delicious. Thanks to Lyla and Lisa for coming up with such a neat activity!

It all sounds and looks so neato, until you think about sleeping on a cot in a room with 15 people. Since there were 8 dorms that could handle 15 people each, it was quite an amazing thing. Luckily, not all beds were filled. A rough estimate would be that there were 25 empty beds among the 8 dorms. Regardless, our particular dorm was damn-near full and it was not easy sleeping.

Dorm

Imagine a scooter rolling across a linoleum covered floor on a raised wooden platform floor at 5:45 a.m. Yes. That was a real situation here! It wasn’t until I acquired a can of WD-40, that I was able to say I would stay after the first night. The bathroom door (center door in the picture ((oh yes, I’m complaining, and there was actually a bathroom in the dorm)) was sooooooooooooo loud! I had to nip that in the bud or leave. It is that simple.

So we are home. Safe. Relatively unharmed.

We know a lot more cuss words now. And we can burp while we say things.

Thank god for homeschooling and socialization! :)

June 15, 2007 | Filed Under Trips and Travel, Learning, Parenting | 4 Comments 

The Birds and the Bees and the Okracoke Ferry

(Note: For some reason, I am unable to upload photos to my blog, so I had to load these pictures from a different site.  Hopefully it won’t take too long.)

We’ve been vacationing in the northern part of the Outer Banks for, well, forever it seems — at least 25 years. We’ve driven down to Hattaras several times, but we’ve never ridden the ferry to Okracoke Island before. This year, I was determined that we would do it. We rented a house for two weeks this year, so there was no reason not to spend one day making the trip south.

We waited about 30 minutes to drive onto the ferry. Here I am hanging out in the car:

Ferry Ride

We were all sitting in the car and I noticed that the sea gulls were sitting on the pilings by the car (see poles to right of car). They were kind of neat, so I popped out of my window and sat on the car door snapping pictures. I was particularly intrigued by the pole that had two gulls on it, because most of the poles only had one.

Birds1

I snapped several shots in a row, showing their different movements:

Birds2

Birds3

Birds4

They were so neat. I got tired of snapping pictures of them though and I hopped back into my seat. All the sudden, there was this shrieking and squawking and we all looked up and saw this:

Birds5

LOOK MOM!! They’re fighting!! I think that big one wants the little one to get off that pole!

June 5, 2007 | Filed Under Trips and Travel, Learning | 7 Comments 

An apple a day…

Today was our apple picking field trip. The weather was miserable, but we had fun anyway. We went on a hayride (thankfully, the wagon was covered), learned about how an apple tree grows and produces apples, picked apples, learned how the apples get from the tree to the store, and had a wonderful “family style” lunch at the lodge.

The very best part of the trip though was buying gas on the way back home. Most of the stations had marked their gas down to $2.19/gallon sometime during the day. That’s a far cry from the $2.77 my husband paid LAST NIGHT here in our area. Maybe we need to move to the country!

Here are a few pics from our adventure:

Simon and Theodore (Alvin refused to “look foolish”)

Animals

*****

In the apple cooler (we were VERY wet, and it was only 34 degrees in there!):

Apple Cooler

*****

Sorting seeds:

Sorting Seeds

September 11, 2006 | Filed Under Trips and Travel, Learning | 2 Comments 

Hershey Park!

When the rain finally stopped, we realized that we actually could go on a mini vacation. The only problem was that we hadn’t planned anything because they were calling for rain the entire week. Late Wednesday night, I searched frantically online for weekend getaways. I had narrowed it down to Williamsburg, Ocean City, Hershey Park, and Richmond (to visit relatives, which was the absolute LAST choice). Unfortunately, everything seemed to be booked or outrageously expensive. I was bummed and went to bed at 1am discouraged and sad.

Thursday morning, I got up at 8am and started searching again. A neighbor had told me about Hotwire.com a couple of days earlier and I decided to try it. Mostly, everything was still either booked or too expensive, but I finally decided to go ahead and book “a 2 1/2 star hotel in the Hershey area.” The “Hershey area” on hotwire is pretty darned huge, so I figured we might be close to Hershey or far. I really didn’t want to vacation in our back yard, which is where we were headed at that point, so I booked it.

I had no idea what type of hotel I might get. Two and a half stars didn’t seem so great. This was non-refundable and they wouldn’t let me put in 3 kids without booking two rooms. I booked one room for 2 adults and 2 kids and figured we’d just let one sleep in the car! NOT! I was desperate and I knew we could work something out. We’ve had the three kid problem before, and none of the hotels really care when the kids are so little. We planned to stay two nights and wait until Saturday to decide where to go for our last night. We were thinking Gettysburg or perhaps another night in Hershey. By now, you’ve probably figured out that we thrive on spontaneity. Well, not really, we’re just super disorganized. emoticon

Around noon on Thursday, we headed out for Hershey. We’d never been there and we had no idea what to expect. We didn’t tell the kids where we were going, only that they were gonna be happy. It took only a little over 2 hours to get there. I cannot believe that we did not know how many cool things there are to do in Pennsylvania and how close it really is to us.

The hotel turned out to be fantastic. It was a Comfort Inn just 2 miles from the entrance to Hershey Park. They had a great breakfast included, and a nice (but small) indoor pool that the kids loved. Theodore didn’t have to sleep in the car afterall! We set up a little sleeping space for him on the floor by the dressers. They never asked how many kids when I checked in, so my guilt meter stayed down.

That afternoon, we wandered around Hershey a bit, bought hats at K-mart, and ate dinner at the Soda Jerk Diner (I recommend this for families). The next morning we went to Hershey Park. I messed up on the park opening time, and we got there just after 9am. The park didn’t open until 10am. Early arrival ensured that we got a great parking space and quick admission. The kids loved the rides and after we finished at the park, we toured Chocolate World (the pretend version of the chocolate factory).

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped to have dinner at Taco Bell. Nobody was really hungry, so we didn’t want to waste money on a nicer place. We met an older couple as we were leaving who suggested that we go to Lancaster/Strasburg and check out the Amish country and ride the steam train. Ward Cleaver adores trains, so we checked it out online. Hooray for high speed wireless connections in hotels! We decided to forego visiting the Hershey Gardens on Saturday and head to Strasburg instead. That turned out to be a fantastic decision.

We got to Strasburg around 12:30 and stayed till a little after 4. We went to the Toy Train Museum, the Railroad Museum, and we rode the Strasburg train. It’s a refurbished steam train from the early 1900s and it was awesome!!

This trip ranks way up there with BEST TRIPS EVER. Maybe it was THE BEST TRIP EVER. We had so much fun in so little time. Since Strasburg is only 3 hours away, we decided to just drive home instead of spending money on another hotel. We were home by 7pm on Saturday.

Here are some pics of the fun:

Fun 1Fun 2Fun 3

July 2, 2006 | Filed Under Trips and Travel | 2 Comments