Category Archives: Adventure

Has it been over a week?

Adventure, Family,

I have been absent from here for a few days and I can’t believe it is already 2012!  So, a lot has happened since I last wrote.  It turns out that Santa still comes to our house.  As long as everyone still sees sugarplums dancing in their heads, Santa keeps coming to our house.  So, Santa brought the kids a trip starting the day after Christmas.  I’ll tell you more about that later but it was a big hit.  Aside from that, we had a pretty low-keyed Christmas which was absolutely perfect.

Socks for Christmas A simple Christmas

We had family over for a late-ish lunch and did a little napping and otherwise goofed off.  We had to pack of course.  Santa made reservations for the day after Christmas so there was little time to waste.  Ok, so you want to know where we went?  We went to the Great Wolf Lodge near Cincinatta (That’s how we say Cincinnati here in WV).  It’s a huge indoor water park.  At first, I figured it was going to have a few lawn sprinklers and a diaper-seasoned kiddie pool.  I was soooo wrong!  The park had a wave pool and a lazy river and a half-dozen really awesome water slides!  Water slides used to mean you skidded down on your butt and had to wiggle your way down the bottom half…oh no, not at Great Wolf Lodge.  The rides are awesome and you haul butt around the curves and down the tubes.

Great Wolf Lodge Great Wolf Lodge

Abigail was pretty concerned at first but I assured her that we wouldn’t die.  She agreed to go on a ride with me after that (she actually bought the part about not dying.)  I told her they had not lost anyone in a few weeks.  Once she got a few rides under her belt, we could barely keep up with her running to get back in line again.

Great Wolf Lodge Great Wolf Lodge

Isaac was more diverse in his use of the park.  He spent a lot of time dumping buckets of water on unsuspecting people below.  He really made use of the entire place pretty well too.  For some reason, Isaac and Abigail never got cold.  They kept the air temperature at 84 degrees but I swear the water was 60.  Anyhow, they never got cold but my lips turned blue and my nose hairs froze and broke off.

Great Wolf Lodge - Lazy River
Great Wolf Lodge - Lazy River
Great Wolf Lodge - Water Slide
Great Wolf Lodge - Water Slide

The other cool part of the surprise is that Santa gave my brother and sister-in-law the same gift!  The kids had no idea they were coming so it was a great surprise.  All-in-all, it was a great trip.  We only stayed 2 nights and that was just about right.  Great Wolf is mighty proud of their place so my wallet is glad Santa only sent us for a short time.  We were physically exhausted after two nights anyhow.  I bet we burned a Christmas ham’s worth of calories in three days!

Cart Riding at Great Wolf Lodge
Getting ready to ride!
Cart Riding at Great Wolf Lodge
Just before the near-crash!

When we checked out, my brother and I were sent out into the cold to load all of our loot into our cars for the trip home.  Living up to our 13-year old mindsets (though possibly not my 40 year old body), we returned the luggage carts in typical pubescent-boy fashion!  I have to give props to my brother for using his ultra-manly muscles to prevent me from turning over.  We were absolutely hauling butt across the parking lot hoping to provide an example to my kids and all of the other kids that got the chance to see how grown-ups are supposed to act!

My braces are off!!

Adventure, Thoughts,

A little over 2 years ago, my foray into the world of braces and oral pain began.  I am here to tell you that yesterday, my braces were removed.  I didn’t have braces in the traditional sense because I was fitted with Invisalign aligners.  Part of that process, though, involved the installation of tons of knobs and buttons and bumps on my teeth so the aligners could grab onto something.  So, I had knobs and bumps and stuff removed yesterday and my teeth are straight!

 

Growing up as a boy with a brother who liked to fight (it was mutual), my teeth were a wreck.  I had chips and dings in my teeth, both top and bottom.  After grinding all of the extra stuff off of my teeth, they ground my teeth too.  I no longer have chipped or uneven teeth!  Although those chips were hard won, I am happy to be free from their unhappy appearance.  I have to tell you though, it was a lot more fun getting those chips than having them ground away.  Holy cow was that awful!

Before Invisalign

 

After Invisalign…cheesy grin at no extra charge

 

So, I was fitted for retainers and now I will spend 4 months wearing them 24/7.  If all goes well with that, I will wear them only at night after that period.  I am pretty pleased with how all of this went down.  I would do it again if I had to go back in time.  What I wouldn’t do, however, is use Invisalign.  I would get the regular old fashioned braces and be done with it. Mainly, I like the cool colored rubber bands.  Actually, either way you can see stuff in your mouth.  Invisalign aligners are not invisible and I needed to wear rubber bands anyhow in order to move my teeth and bite around.  With the bands, Invisalign aligners are a ton more work every time you eat or drink anything besides water.  No thanks.  Hopefully I will never know though.

 

WV to PA to WV

Adventure, Family,

Abigail and I went to my parents’ house in Tionesta, PA last weekend so Abigail could stay several days before school started.  Isaac made the middle school soccer team so he has practice 6 days a week.  Anyhow, I took pics along the way and thought the mess of them was pretty interesting…

 

 

 

A landmark a few towns from home

It’s so pretty driving there

What a salad I had!

  

It isn’t any good without a campfire!

Marshmallows were bigger up there!

Too big for the graham crackers!

It was sort of funny…

Oh yes, there were clouds…not sure why I got so many pics of clouds!   

Well, I made it back Sunday and my Mom and Abigail made it back on Wednesday.  More of a ricochet than a trip but still a pretty good time!

Our car…the worm edition

Adventure, Awesome, Family, Fun, Nature,

So a few days ago, I told you all about the fun we had with crows on our honeymoon.  You may recall that my brother and a friend had put a bunch of birdseed into our suitcases as well as in the car.  By “in the car” I mean inside the car…literally.  There was birdseed in the dashboard, in the heater vents, down in the seats, floorboards, and even more in the dashboard.  Well, you get the point.  Anytime we drove around and hit a bump, even months later, birdseed would fall through the dash and onto the floor.

The start of the birdseed saga!

Jump ahead to our move to Kentucky for graduate school.  We were in marital bliss.  I suppose we didn’t see the world around us very clearly as we missed some obvious things…you’ll see in a second.  So, we were poor and all that but it was cool being married.  Emily seems to remember a rough few years as she attempted to train and civilize me.  Once she gave up, things got much better.  Anyhow, part-way through school, we moved to an apartment above a funeral home (more on that in another post!).

We noticed some wormy things in the backseat one day while unpacking groceries or something at the funeral home.  I didn’t think much of it.  I squished them and went on with my business.  Days later, we noticed them again…and again and again.  It started to get serious pretty quickly.

The car...already doomed!

I got a wild hair and decided to remove the back set of the car to see what was going on.  Why oh why didn’t I just remain ignorant?!  The entire back seat was infested with meal worms!  I don’t just mean there were a few crawling around.  Oh no, the foam in the seat was full.  The carpet in the floor was infested.  It was a regular larval zoo in our car!

I often deal with things like that with extreme overkill.  We had a Chevy Celebrity which, incidentally, was the best car ever made!  I loved that car!  Emily and I sanded the thing down in the weeks before our wedding so we could get it painted.  We wanted to make a flashy exit from the wedding ceremony.  Anyhow, back to overkill.  A Chevy Celebrity has maybe 30 sq ft of cabin space.  An insect bomb for a 2000 sq ft house seemed about right.  Makes sense, right?  If some is good, more is better!

On two separate occasions, I set off house-sized insect bombs in our little car.  The worms remained.  It’s a wonder we remained!  I am certain that a concentration of insecticide like that was not all that good for us.  After losing on the second bomb, I just re-installed the back seat and we looked no more.

How did we finally deal with the issue, you may ask?  Well, we traded that car in for a Chevy Prizm, the second best car ever made!  It was new and worm-free!  I blame those worms on the birdseed.  I have no doubt that the seed had meal worms in it.  They lived a good life for a couple of years on all of the birdseed in the car.  That wedding birdseed was the gift that kept on giving!

Our honeymoon…the crow edition

Adventure, Fun, WV,

Emily and I were at a party for grown-ups (it rarely happens) when we got to telling stories.  Emily is a champion story-teller and she decided to spring our honeymoon story on folks.  It goes something like this…

We had just graduated college and were preparing for graduate school.  In translation, that means we were beyond poor when we got married.  We had just plunked down our security deposit on our 350 sq ft apartment and had moved what stuff we had a week before.  Our wedding was excellent and it was a super great occasion.  I cried when I saw Emily come down the aisle.  I am not opposed to crying, but I rarely do it.  Anyhow, it was a beautiful wedding.

After the wedding, we greeted guests and ended up with perma-grins on our faces from all of the smiling we did in the photo shoots.  We were definitely ready to head off on our honeymoon.  I planned it all and didn’t tell Emily where we were going.  I, uh, figured it didn’t really matter as just needed some time to get used to the idea of being married.  I booked us a room at the Mountain Creek Lodge at Pipestem Resort in southern West Virginia.

Little did I know, that my brother and one of our friends had filled our luggage and car with a ton of birdseed while we were cutting cake and smiling.  Honestly, it had to be close to a ton.  So, we got to the room and were exhausted.  We ate and half unpacked our stuff.  Without thinking, I just dumped the ton of birdseed from our suitcases outside in the yard just beyond the edge of our first story patio.  We went straight to bed, dead-tired and desperate for rest and calm.

Around daylight, let’s say 6 am the following day, we were startled from bed by the cawing of a family of crows.  That is, crows, right outside our window.  Crows cawing a mere 4 feet or so from our bed.  Yeah, crows.  I scared them off a few times but it was hopeless.  Sleeping in was not to be on our honeymoon.

There are a few more tails from that week of adventure but I’ll leave Emily to tell them another time.  But before I go, I have to tell you that the crows were not the end of the birdseed story.  Oh no, dear friends, there is more.   I will tell the rest of the story in my next post.

 

Coopers Rock

Adventure, Awesome, Family, Fun, Nature, WV, , , , ,

A few weekends ago, we went on a little getaway vacation to Coopers Rock State Park in Bruceton Mills, WV.  I was mainly excited for the cabin in which we were staying and the hot tub it advertised on the back deck.  Never did I imagine how cool the park would be.  More about that later.

So, we got to the cabin after navigating the Grand Canyon road back to the place.  The cabin itself was nice and did in fact have a hot tub.  The kids jumped right in as Emily and I unpacked and prepared for supper.  I am not sure why, but the power went out and we were without water or AC.  When you are not prepared, both are pretty important.  Anyhow, several hours later, it came back on and all was well…even the well.  We could shower and do dishes, etc.

On Saturday morning, we gorged on cheap powdered sugar donuts and Doritos then headed to Coopers Rock (it seems like there should be an apostrophe in there but there isn’t).  Little did we know, but there was a celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the park.  The place was teeming with things to do as all sorts of groups offered nature talks, projects,  and hikes.

The kids built cool birdhouses and painted rocks.  We played on the play ground (where I tried my best to dislocate my shoulder).  We saw rescued birds of prey from the West Virginia Raptor Rescue Center and even got to touch a red tailed hawk who was very friendly.  It turns out, she was essentially raised in captivity so was not bothered by people.  The other rescued hawk and owl were not so friendly.  Still, they were awesome!

I think the best part of the park though, was walking the trails under the rocks.  We explored some and saw great rock formations.  The kids and I walked into a cave/tunnel and went all “Dora the Explorer”.  Abigail fell in the dirt and got muddy.  It was perfect and cool and a great time to be together as a family.

If you ever pass through the northern part of WV, stop in at Coopers Rock.  Its views are breathtaking and there is all sorts of fun to be had there.  It turns out that the hot tub was very popular, but it paled in comparison (for me at least) to the beauty of our state, just as it is!

Fire the missiles!

Adventure, Family, Fun, WV, , ,

Lest you think we are all work and no play when we go to our land in the country, I figured I should report on our war games…er…model rocket launching fun this weekend. We did work some but that bit seems like an old tune now. The kids were pretty much over the non-fun stuff so they explored some in the woods and found a new “hide-out” while I did the rest of what I had to do before play time. I have no idea what sort of cave, bramble or whiskey still they happened upon but they had an awesome time!

Preparing for launch!

Anyhow, we finished up with all of that and we headed to the top of the hay field to prep our launch area. There were a bunch of kids at the next house over so I think our position was as much an advertisement as it was anything else. So we launched a few rockets. It must have been the humidity or something because the nose cones were on so tight that they never discharged the parachutes. And what is a model rocket without a parachute as it heads back to earth? It’s a freakin’ bullet! Run!

Mission Control

Isaac and Abigail decided to invite the neighbor kids over and they brought some cousins so there were at least 6 kids…more targets! Just kidding. We were very careful to keep everyone safe. Everyone got a chance to push the launch button, which I thought would be the thrill. I was wrong. The real fun was racing across the field to recover the rockets! Who knew exercise was so fun!

The rocket!
10...9...8...7...

One boy said he had always wanted to launch rockets but his Mom wouldn’t let them (for safety reasons I bet!) I think I found our new role on the hill. We are the people who let you do all the stuff your parents won’t let you do!

Click to play the launch movie

(click here if your computer cannot play the movie above)

By the time we were through, we had a bunch of the parents up there too. We have met so many people and everyone has been so nice. I suspect most everyone confirmed that we are the unstable, crazy ones up on that hill. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing?

Driving in the hay field

Adventure, Family, Fun, ,

So yesterday, I mentioned that we went camping last weekend.  The spot where we camped is on the back side of our hay field which lays on a bit of a slope.  We drove both vehicles down to the edge of the woods and left them there overnight so we could have easy access to the junk that remained in them.

This was a month ago...before the grass really grew!

Since we knew it was to get hot, we decided to get an early start.  I am so glad there are no near-neighbors because I started the chainsaw at 6:30 am.  Anyhow, we packed up camp and planned to move the car and van to the end of the hay field where I am erecting my bear-deterring fence for the bees.  Emily started up the Subaru and drove right off though the thigh-high grass in the field.  The van did not fare so well.  The tires spun but the van never moved.

It was clear to me that we were not going to simply drive out so we had to go to plan b.  And then it struck me.  My friend Maria over at Chicken Blog sent me a cool book last year called Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do).  One of the things the book suggests is to let your kids drive a car.

So, I climbed out of the van and hollered at Isaac.  He’s 11 (and a year older than I was when I first drove a car).  I told him to get in and drive.  He looked at me with that, “Yeah right” look but I opened the door and pointed.  He climbed in and was terrified.  I think that was the proper response.  We did a crash-course on driving and then I went behind the van.  I planned to nudge it to get it moving while he drove it slowly and steadily across the field.  He started off ok, but when it didn’t immediately move, he gunned it.  White smoke rolled from under the tires.

“Dad, the speedometer showed 60!”  I have no doubt about it.  Isaac drove the car 60 mph in the hay field but didn’t move an inch!  We re-visited our driving lesson and on try #2, he successfully drove the van right across the hay field and up to the dirt road.  The boy was so excited and could not have been prouder of himself.  Although his friends did not believe him when he got back to school on Tuesday, he will probably always remember the first time he got to drive a car.  Sometimes a little (controlled) danger can be a good thing!

Haulin’ water

Adventure,

So, yesterday I mentioned that we set the first 4 posts for the bee yard.  To make them semi-permanent, I wanted them anchored in concrete.  The property that we own is raw land so we do not yet have water available on site.  To mix the concrete, of course, we needed water.  I hated the idea of hauling water especially since we didn’t have any sort of official water carrier.  Still, without it, we were dead in the…uh…water.  So, we decided on two water sources.  First, we had a five gallon bucket that had a seal-able lid that worked very well.  Knowing that would not be enough, we also filled a 30 gallon plastic tote half way full of water.

This is next on my list of stuff to get at Tractor Supply!

We (meaning me) should have known better but in my haste to get out there, I decided to press on.  Half way full won’t slosh too much, right?  I mean, I put a cover on it.  No problems, right?  Yeah, wrong.  It’s gets even funnier.  In addition to all that water, I had 320 pounds of concrete and 50 pounds of gravel…oh yeah, and four 4x4s as well as all of the stuff we normally take out there.  We were packed solid and ready for anything.

So, I slowly start down the driveway.  Our house is on a steep hill so we didn’t even get out of our driveway before the water sloshed out and all over the back.  Remeber all that stuff I had back there?  Yeah.  I figured at that point that we are already wet…it can’t get worse, right?  Wrong.

The interstate part of the trip was smooth as you might expect.  But, we go from interstate to a 2-lane paved road.  Also not so bad.  It’s when we went from paved road to “paved” road that things got worse.  Emily and I had a “discussion” about the whole thing.  During that “discussion”, I decided that it would be better for her to drive so we switched places…you can sort of see the tone of our dialogue.

Emily and me "discussing" in the back of the van

Anyhow, we finally made it, missing only a few gallons.  I dug the first hole and went to get the first bag of concrete.  You know, concrete comes in paper bags.  Do you know what happens to paper bags when they meet water?  Nothing good I can tell you.

Anyhow, I quickly learned new and creative ways to carry the concrete and all ended well in that regard.  See, no worries, right?  Not so much.  I am now the proud driver of the van until the mildew smell gets out of the back end.  I hope it doesn’t get too hot the next few days.  I may not survive!

Our woods

Adventure, Awesome, Family, Fun, Nature, Thoughts, WV, , , , ,

We spent our time at the property on Saturday walking in the woods.  Our plan was to walk more of the property line as we still haven’t seen the entire place.  We did hike the better part of the boundary and discovered all sorts of excellent things!  Except for the constant chatter of kids, the sounds of the woods were magnificent.  Actually, the chatter wasn’t so bad either as the kids were having fun.

When I was a kid, hiking in the woods was not high on my list of fun.  I played in the woods a lot but plain old hiking wasn’t good for me.  I was so surprised that Isaac and Abigail walked the entire 2 miles in the woods with only a small handful of complaints.  Incredible!

We did walk the better part of the lower edge of the place and saw all sorts of beautiful flowers and animal tracks of all sorts.  There were too many deer tracks to even keep track of but the kids tried to identify every print they came across.

That's Abigail's finger...she's the brave one

We spooked a turkey and saw the biggest centipede the kids had ever seen.  We found just a little bit of poison ivy and a lot of slippery moss.  Squirrels barked and birds announced our path through the woods.  All around us was noise but it felt like silence.  It was marvelous walking in our woods and this weekend was the reason we bought the place!  I am absolutely positive that my blood pressure is still lowered because of it!