We are loving the no humidity, views of the mountains, beautiful skies…

We’ve been having major issues with internet connectivity, so the final posts on Maine, and how we decided on Colorado will have to wait for a bit longer.

At this moment, we are in western Pennsylvania, on our way to CO.  We expect to get there Wednesday.  The kids have been fabulous the last two days.  We’ve done some really long days of driving.  Last night we didn’t stop until bedtime, and ended up staying in a Walmart parking lot, then getting on the road by 730 this morning.  The real kicker is, we haven’t actually decided on a city yet.  We’ve heard great things about Fort Collins, so we’re going to start there.  We can usually tell pretty quickly if we don’t like a city, so we’ll look around when we get there.  We heard good things about Brattleboro Vermont too, but when we got there, I just wanted to pressure wash the entire place.  We didn’t like it at all.  If not Fort Collins, we’ll go down to Colorado Springs, we were there last time out and like it.  The worst part is that school starts next week, and I seriously doubt we’ll find a house to rent, and get whatever else we need done in time for the kids to start on the first day.  We’ll give it a try though.

I can’t decide what I’m looking forward to the most, reliable and fast internet connection, or a library so we can read books before we decide to buy them.  We’ve spent a small fortune on books for them in the last two months.  Mostly from used book stores, but not all.

Then we went to see an old cemetery in town with a lot of examples of unusual monuments.  That was really neat too.  There is some amazing stuff in there.  The one in the first picture is from the early 1900’s.  The dead guy’s brother carved this life-sized monument from a single piece of granite.  The detail is amazing, down to the buttonholes in his jacket.  Here’s the story if you want to read more - scroll down to the second picture in the article.

Somewhere along the way, I found a link to a spider web farm.    How could we not go there??  Turns out the guy has been doing this for over 30 years.  He has made these frames, and hopes spiders will build webs in them.  He sometimes collects egg sacs from the field and puts them in the barn to hatch.  Seems to work for him.  We bought one.

We decided to to a little letterboxing around Montpelier.  I found a series of 5 in another cool old cemetery.  Margaret has an interesting story.  Unfortunately, the clues weren’t very good, and we had to do a little backtracking in this drive-thru, tiny road cemetery.  It didn’t work so well in the giant truck.  We didn’t bother trying to find the last two boxes.

We wanted to meet the guy who designs First Day Cottages, which is the house we thinking of building.  He and his wife were incredibly nice, he took us to see a completed house so we could walk around inside one and talk to the owners.  They also invited us over for dinner, and let the kids enjoy their pool.  It was great fun and we learned a lot.

We’ve had a lot of internet connectivity issues lately, and I’ve been working on this post for days.  I could write a little more but I’m tired of it and ready to move on.

Burlington was cool, we really liked it.  But jobs are a problem.  Apparently a lot of people who live there are retirees.   That’s fine, I don’t want to live there anyway.  I can’t put my finger on it, but it just wasn’t the right place.  Vermont in general is gorgeous, but it feels claustrophobic.  Too many trees, which I never thought I’d say.  You can’t see for any distance, just the next hill over, and only if you’re lucky.

There is a ton of stuff to do around Vermont.  We HAD to go find Ben & Jerry’s, and it was great.

That was it for Pennsylvania, we’re spending tonight in Catskill, NY, and will move up to Vermont tomorrow.

The second thing I wanted to do was go to an art show, where they were also having a Meet the Author table with some kids’ authors.  One of them was Debbie Dadey, an author we read all the time, and the kids really like her books.  I thought it would be cool to go meet her.  It turned out to be a day from hell.  Sean got some kind of stomach bug and felt like crap.  Ian hates art shows so he stayed home with Sean.  It was raining.  I programmed the GPS, which ended up taking me to someone’s house, 45 minutes south of where I was supposed to be.  Right street and number, wrong town completely.  The roads were tiny, with lots of one lane bridges.  I went through one town that was having some kind of festival so it was packed.  The street was so narrow people had to just stop and let me to go by since I took part of the oncoming lane.  Being big has some advantages I guess.  I came SO close to throwing the GPS into the river!  I ended up programming it for the center of the city where the festival was and hoping I’d see a sign for it when I got close.  It worked, and the rain stopped right after we got there.  Debbie was there, and turned out to be really really nice.  Caitlin told her about an idea we’d had for a new book, and Debbie wrote it down.  Wouldn’t that be so cool if she actually did use it??  Since it was raining, I didn’t take my big camera with me, but took the little waterproof one instead.  Unfortunately, I forgot the make sure the memory card was in there, and it wasn’t.  Technically, this isn’t my fault, Sean was the last one to use it.  I took Caitlin’s picture with Debbie, but it went to the camera’s internal memory, and the cord to transfer it to my computer is sitting in storage in Orlando.  Debbie also took Caitlin’s picture to put on her website, which Caitlin got a kick out of.  http://debbiedadey.com/Events/index.php Scroll way down to the bottom.

The 3rd thing we wanted to do was see some historical stuff around Philly, which we did one day, but we’re going back to do more tomorrow so I’ll post about that separately.

The streetlights are there on the main street, and they are neat.  The only other thing chocolate themed about the town was a street named Chocolate and one named Cocoa.  I don’t know what I expected, but something more somehow.  It was just like a million other little towns.  Some sculptures here and there might be nice.

We did not do the amusement park or the water park.  Coming from Orlando it just didn’t seem necessary, and it was WAY too hot to do anything outside.  I wanted to go to Chocolate World and do the new Make Your Own Candy Bar thing.  It just opened a few weeks ago.  What they don’t tell you anywhere on the website is that it costs $15 to make this candy bar.  So yes, we spent $60 on candy bars.  That killed me, but it was a lot of fun and the kids absolutely loved it.  Basically, you program what you want into a computer, then watch the automated machines make your bar.  They only have milk chocolate available now, but later on you’ll be able to pick from dark or white chocolate as well.  You can choose 3 out of 6 different things to put inside, and whether or not you want Kissables sprinkled on top.

There is a free ride that takes you through an explanation of how chocolate is made.  It was hard to hear though so we didn’t really learn anything.  Watching the machines pretend to work was kind of neat.  The rest of the place was more candy-related shopping than I ever imagined.  At first it was cool to be surrounded by so much chocolate STUFF!   After a little while it was just overwhelming due to the sheer volume.  And since we don’t buy useless stuff, and try to avoid eating a lot of junk food, there wasn’t much I wanted to buy.  I did want a new Tshirt – one of my favorites that I have says Hershey – You Never Forget Your First Love.  I got paint on it.  They didn’t have that one anymore though.  Caitlin did pick up a charm bracelet that was pretty cute but cheap crap from China.  When we saw the price tag of $15 even she didn’t want it.  I think I’m babbling now.  Bottom line is I’m glad we went, it was fun, but we don’t ever need to go back.

We spent one morning walking around Manassas National Battlefield.  The kids hated it but we made them do it anyway.

Then we went to our niece’s wedding, which was great fun.  Though Ian thought it was all boring, but he liked eating dinner.  Again, I did a bad job with pictures.  I only took this one shot of the kids, didn’t even think to take a better one of them all dressed up.  Then I got tired of lugging the big camera so I put it back in the truck.

On the 4th we went over to Don’s house for a cookout, which was great fun.  The kids got to play with cousins, which they loved.  They had a Magic 8 Ball, which said we’ll be settling in New England.  If only I had thought to ask two years ago.  The kids played with sparklers, then we crashed the Congressional Country Club fireworks and watched from beside the fairway.  It was great, close to the house and no throngs of people.

Next stop – Hershey PA

Luray was very hot, so not nearly as much fun, or pretty,  as when we were there in the fall.  We didn’t do as much hiking as I would have liked because of the heat.  We did go up to Skyline Drive a couple of times though.  Don’t forget to hover your mouse over the photos to see the comments.

Sean went for a hike by himself along the Appalachian Trail.  We dropped him off in the afternoon, then picked him up about 20 miles down the road 2 days later.  I’m very proud of him for accomplishing his goal, but I don’t want to do any overnight hikes myself.  Maybe if someone else carried the backpack, but I doubt it.  It was very hot and buggy.  And yes, I had to feed the kids.  I love PBJ.  I did grill hamburgers one night but they weren’t great.  The chocolate frosted donuts for dessert made up for it though.

We repeated a hike we did last time we were here, down to Dark Hollow Falls.  It was a lot more crowded this time, even on a weekday.  We had to wait quite awhile for people to get out of the way so I could take pictures.  By the time they did, the sun was back out from behind the clouds, spoiling my pictures.

One day we drove over to Harper’s Ferry, where we had a good hike last time.  Sophie came with us since we were going to be gone for several hours.  The hike was steeper than I remembered, and she had some trouble with it.  Looks like age is slowing her down and she won’t be able to go on hikes that aren’t mostly flat.  Its hell getting old.

We checked out the used book store in Front Royal that I found for sale online.  The store itself was great, but when I asked the guy behind the counter if it was for sale he said no.  Okay, hmm.  We stopped again a few days later (buying more kids’ books) and there was a woman behind the counter.  I asked her if it was for sale.  She said no, but she’d sell it if I wanted it.  We exchanged a few emails and I found out she had listed the store for sale a couple of years ago but took it off the market.  I think I must have found the old ad.  I checked out the area schools a little bit online and it was not encouraging.   I found a site that compared schools within the state, and these schools all ranked in the bottom third.  Its a nice area to visit, but it didn’t make me want to stop looking.

In between house projects we went and did a few fun things.  We took the kids and dogs to the beach one morning where they are allowed off leash, but we got kicked off by a cop.  Turns out you have to have a special license to be on that beach, and dogs have to get off the beach by 10am, not just be back on leash.  He pointed out several times that we would have known these things if we had read the sign.  The funny part was, the sign he pointed to was a warning about riptides, not dog rules.  The sign was too far away to read right then, so I didn’t argue.  And darned if that cop didn’t sit there and watch us until we were off the beach.  We looked at the entrance, thinking we had missed the sign, but nope, it wasn’t there.  We did finally see one down the road at another entrance.  Whatever, I’m not going back there anytime soon anyway, and we got to stay long enough to wear out the dogs.  Hover your mouse over the picture to read the description.

Down the street from Marie’s is Jack’s Cosmic Dogs.  I didn’t find out until later that they’ve been featured on several Food Network shows.  I had the Blue Galactic Dog, with chili, cheese, sweet potato mustard, and bleu cheese coleslaw.  Best. Hotdog. Ever.  We went back the next day for another one.  And excellent draft root beer.

Another day we went to check out the Children’s Museum.  It wasn’t nearly as big as some of the other ones we’ve been too, but the kids had a lot of fun, and it was a good way to keep them very busy for a couple of hours.

Tonight we’re in Harmony, NC.  Tomorrow we’ll get to Luray, VA and stay for a week.  Last time we were there we planned to stay 2 days but stayed 2 weeks instead.  Can’t wait to be there again.