09 June 2006

Our Fabulous 24 Hour Vacation

Since we've moved to a new area of the country we've decided to take our summer vacation to explore our surroundings. We had part 1 of summer vacation 2006 this week.

We started off with a free concert in a local park. Being small-town hicks, to us the words "free concert" mean "oh, maybe 100 people show up if the weather's nice." Of course, this concert advertised fireworks, so we suspected a few more folks would show up...but, wow, we weren't prepared for Life in the Big City. Hundreds and hundreds of people, swarms of people, all on blankets and lawnchairs, most of them eating birthday cake and ice cream (it was a celebration of the area's birthday, complete with free cake, which we didn't eat ... plus, we took our own ice cream substitute, in this case fruit juice sweetened Soy Delicious). Gobs of kids running around, dancing to music. Before the fireworks the kids were all told to go find their parents (how? Did they all have GPS?). Then we all settled down to an amazingly nice fireworks display. Again, we are used to the more, umm, small town sensibilities in regards to fireworks. This was on par with some 4th of July celebrations we've seen.

Next day was Zoo Day. I was on animal overload after about an hour, but the kids wanted to see EVERYTHING. We didn't, thankfully. We left after about 3 hours. We also stopped by to see the turtle sculptures at Turtle Park (okay, what really happened is that we parked in Turtle Park and walked across the bridge to the zoo, since the zoo is free but parking is $9, and we are CHEAP. And, yes, we carried along a cooler with food to the zoo, but no ice cream this time).

We got home from the zoo, made the delightful discovery that one of the balls had fallen out of the trees in the backyard (you know those really big play balls you can get? that are about 5 foot circumference? We had 3 of them stuck about 30 feet up in the trees in our backyard, along with a soccer ball we threw up to try to knock the big balls down. I tried to get a picture, but on-ground photos can't really do justice to the way we're transforming our yard into an Easter Egg Hunt for Young Giants).

After a brief rest, it was time to repack the snacks, re-apply sunscreen, and head to the pool. We love the local pool. It isn't very crowded and it's mostly flat water.

Evening was time to fire up the grill. Then tumble into our own beds with our own cats to keep us company ... possibly the best part of vacationing at home.

1 comment:

Brewer said...

sounds like a fantastic day! Congrats! and here's to many more of them :)