Oh my goodness!! Summer is flying by and I really need it to slow down!! What a busy and fun summer we have had though! We have been camping, took our first official "family vacation", survived t-ball and our gardens are the best they have ever been!
First our camping trip. What fun we had! We took our 4 kids, my sister-n-law, her husband their 3 kids, my other sister-n-law and my husband's cousin and his wife and 2 kids and we went to Sycamore Springs. If you have not had the chance to go you should! It is in English. So not a far trip and it is completely FREE!!!!! They have primitive camping and camper hook ups. They provide all the electricity, water & fire wood. They have the nicest shower houses and bathrooms that I have ever been in!! They come around twice a day and empty all the trash cans. They have several shelter houses where you can reserve them for birthday parties, reunions etc. They also have very, very nice playgrounds! They have bike trails for the kids and adults. My kids' favorite was a great big tunnel you could ride bikes through. The whole campground has a creek winding through it. We spent a lot of time in the creek. We all spent one afternoon wading through it catching crawdads. Which we had later that night for supper. They were really good to eat and really easy to fix!! I am sure that will be something we do again! They also had a really neat little hike. You pulled yourself up the side of a hill about 100 yards with a rope, then you walk across a grated bridge overlooking rock cliffs and come back down a spiral staircase! This chic kept her feet planted safely at the bottom but the rest loved it!!
Next we went on our family vacation. My mother and father-in-law are going to be celebrating their 35th Wedding Anniversary in November. So they wanted all of us to go down to Gatlinburg and stay in a cabin for 4 nights. It was fun but with 20 people staying in the same cabin it was hectic!!! Anywhere we all go is a little chaotic to say the least. There are 7 grandkids that are 5 and under, 1 10 year old and 1 15 year old. On this particular trip the 10 and 15 year olds each had a friend along too!! We left our house on a Wednesday morning at 5:30 am and by the time all the bathroom stops and lunch stops and let me out of this car before someone gets hurt stops we finally made it to our cabin at a little after 5:00 pm! We made supper and settled in and called it a night!
The next morning we did breakfast got 20 people ready and headed to the aquarium. It is a very neat attraction and we did enjoy it. They had penguins and they were a lot of fun to watch. The tunnel you go through was probably our favorite. You ride a conveyor belt through a tunnel where every kind of marine life you can think of swims all around you. It was fun and the kids enjoyed seeing all of the animals but for a mom with four kids who is really never in a crowd (except every other week when I contain all 4 kids to a shopping cart and brave Wal-Mart) it was nerve racking!!!! After we were done we went to Cooters to race go carts and play miniature golf. The kids loved racing go carts. It was worth it just to see their faces! As for the miniature golf if you have a 5, 4, 3 &1 year old you should just bypass this and save your money!!!
Friday we all went to the Rocky Mountain Knife Works. My kids had a ball here. My 5 year old son had been looking forward to this for months!! He had told everyone that he was getting a knife and there were really only 2 things he was looking for in a good pocket knife...it needed to have 2 blades and a pair of scissors to cut his popsicles open!! What a mess! So he found himself a Swiss Army Knife and declared to the store that "this is the one!" After the Knife Works Store we headed down the strip in search of Cowboy Boots. We ended up at a store where you bought one pair and got 2 free!!! Jackpot!! We left with my son and oldest 2 daughters all a brand new pair of boots for school!!! We headed back to the cabin and took the kids swimming.
Saturday we all did different things. Several went White Water Rafting and Ziplining. I cannot wait to be able to take our crew White Water Rafting! I don't know if any Rafting Company will be ready for that :) We decided to take our kids over the mountains into North Carolina to a Cherokee Indian Reservation! We all had a great time! They demonstrate all their dances and have a little village set up. They take you through a tour and tell you all about their day to day lives!! The most intelligent thing I have heard in a long time came from a young male Indian who was describing how long it took to make a canoe (which was anywhere from 6 months to a year!) "It's only time and that's all we got" How much more peaceful would life be if we could only incorporate that way of thinking in to our everyday lives!!
Sunday was spent driving home to our sweet, sweet dead end road in Dexter!!!
Some of the things that could only happen to our chaotic crew on vacation:
First we rented a cabin where the 11 kids could not go outside and play! We had a cabin that set right on a 300 foot drop!
Second the power was out for about 4 hours Friday afternoon! What do you do with that many kids in a hot dark cabin when they can't go outside? Take them to the basement and have a haunted house!! What else?
Third, the cabin was suppose to have a theater room in it. Ours simply just did not work. We jumped through several hoops to try but it just never panned out. Really it worked out for the best because we could not have fit everyone in the theater and the living room worked great!
And lastly on our way home about 1/4 of us came down with the stomach bug and puked all the way home! MEMORIES!!!!
