We had an awesome, awesome trip down to Florida and back. We were able to see so many friends and family on this trip – it was great. Thanks everyone for your hospitality! The trip started with a quick visit to West Lafayette where we saw college roommates. Then we headed to Rochester and on to Indy. Each stop was great. I’ve got so many pictures I’m going to post those and not do that much typing now. Enjoy.
From Rochester to Indy. It was great to just hang out by the pool all day – the kids had a blast. Jackie taught us all some new dives 🙂
After leaving Indy we headed straight to Mammoth Cave. It was cool. The kids liked it – especially Colleen who is now saying she wants to see more caves. Our guide was very funny and made it a great two hour tour.
Here’s Beth proving that there is definitely a climate & temperature difference once you exit the cave.
When I was in New Hampshire a month or two ago I remember somebody talking about all of the bats dying on the East Cost. After you left Mammoth Cave they had you walk across a foam solution that killed whatever it is that’s killing bats. I was wearing sandals…so my shoes and my feet are now bat friendly.
We stayed in Huntsville, Alabama and made a quick visit to the national space museum. They had tons of really cool stuff. I don’t consider myself that into space but just being there made me want to learn a lot more about past missions and equipment.
Fried green tomatoes – yummy! Also included in this meal were collard greens, buttermilk fried chicken, and gumbo. We finished this off with grits for breakfast the next morning. It was all great…well, except for the collard greens which were nasty 🙂
Somewhere in Alabama.
Here’s the view from our balcony. It was a great location and the hotel had everything we needed. And we luckily only lost one towel from the balcony all week 🙂 Ooops.
Hanging out with the cousins. Having fun. Playing in the sun.
How can you come down here and not play mini-golf at one of the huge, super-cool places. I was the score keeper and coincidentally cleaned up on the mini-golf course.
We also went on a 2-hour pirate cruise. They did a great job with this. The trip included tatoos, a squirt gun fight, swabbing the deck, sword fighting, firing a cannon, and hoisting up a treasure chest from the deep sea. The kids loved it. We also got to see dolphins swim right up to the boat which was cool.
If you squint you can see dolphin fins in the distance over Megan’s head. So cool.
Megan turned six – woohoo! We have always had parties at our house. Megan wanted to go to pump-it-up this year so we gave in. Not my favorite way to throw a party but their staff was great and Megan and her friends had a great time.
The Relay for Life has come and gone. It was very stormy that day so it got moved inside the high school…but then the high school lost power (I was actually outside of the high school driving a fire truck to monitor sparking power lines about 100′ from the high school while my family was inside the high school) so the event started in a backup location with no power – not an ideal situation but everything worked out. Beth and all 3 kids stayed maybe until 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. and then Colleen and a friend stayed with me until about 2:00 a.m. There are activities every hour so they learned how to do the Thriller dance starting at 1:00 a.m., and participated in a frozen t-shirt contest after that, plus gourney rides, snacks, etc. It is a fun yet powerful event.
Here’s how I spent the night of my 40th birthday…fire training…out on the lake in our fire boat. The pump on the boat is loud, hence the ear protection. We can spray water from the lake out through the hose on the boat – wheeee!
This is back before our trip too. The tres amigos showing off their new trophies at the end of baseball season. These three have played basketball and baseball together this year (and are in the same scout troop) – and they are all three playing football together starting in another week or two. Baseball was great for Christopher – he really improved a ton which was fun to watch.
Today was the model rocket event for our scout pack. I was in charge of organizing it this year. Today started off with thunder storms (last night) and a windy & very cloudy morning. I went to the field early today to test a few rockets and see how the field was. There were clouds all around us and I was very, very close to postponing the rocket event until tomorrow. The weather forecasters were all saying to do your indoor stuff today and that tomorrow would be beautiful. Well…I took a chance on the weather clearing and it did just that. We had a beautiful day and a great rocket event. Maybe about 20 scouts showed up and it seemed like everyone had a good time. I enjoy building new rockets and then launching them. I had two unique rockets this year that were crowd pleasers 🙂
Here’s the Decaffinator. It is made out of styrofoam cups that I hot-glued together. I had no idea how well this rocket would fly but it actually flew very straight and was fun to watch. After its second launch the first 4 cups broke off…but I was still able to launch it one more time – just as a much shorter version. The kit showed a picture of a 14′ rocket made out of 116 cups…maybe I’ll work on that one for next year 🙂
And here’s a 2-stage flying saucer. It has two motors – so it went up a bit, paused, and then the 2nd engine ignited. At that point the saucer split into two separate pieces – the first piece falls back to earth and the 2nd piece shoots up even higher. One of the coolest things about this “rocket” was that as each piece fell back down they spun in a cool way (and slow and straight enoug that scouts caught them each time).
I was very relieved to pull off a successful rocket event this year and am already looking forward to next year.
Mom & Dad – Stay strong! You’re in our prayers every day. Keep those attitudes positive and this will all be behind us soon enough!
Wow – lots of photos! This post got to be quite long – wake up now!!!!!
