"Along the edge where the ocean meets the land..." and No kids!!!

So, the weekend of March 27 found us without children. My son went to his mom's for her birthday, and Chris's children's father came down to see them.

So what did we do with our free time? SLEPT.

No, not really. We like to get out to hear live bands and things, but we also get out to do some crazy adventures.

This particular weekend we decided to go for a bike ride and do some geocaches in Back Bay / False Cape State park.

When we got going the weather seemed like it would be fine, but it turned very quickly. The temperature dropped pretty drastically, and a cool dense fog set it.

We thought we would be able to ride on the gravel paths down through the park, but they were closed off due to migrating birds.

We were forced to ride on the beach. This turned out to be a very fortuitous turn of events. We saw our first snake of the year. We found a lot of very cool shells. We had a close encounter with a turkey vulture eating a sting ray (there were several sting rays washed up), and the beach was basically deserted.

By the time we reached False Cape (3-4 miles) we had stopped collecting shells. We just had too many nice ones. Anything inhabited we left were it was though.

Riding "along the edge where the ocean meets the land" is where the sand is firmest. It is still difficult, but doable. When we could finally turn inland the sand was too soft to ride in and we had to ditch the bikes.

We found the spot where the geocache should be, but we could not find the cache. We did find a nice family of boar though. I think there were three adults, three children, and they were all rooting through the mud like mad.

The ride back wasn't too bad and we stopped to eat some great food at Margie & Rays. Thank God they haven't closed too.


Pictures

Rockets....

Hmmm, where was I? Oh yeah, March 22, 2009. So...I'm behind but I'm going to try and catch up quickly.

One thing I will be doing is creating links for pictures. It is just too much work to inject pictures in between what I want to write here. I think that will help speed things up a bit.

:-)

So....back to March 22...we left Mt Trashmore to go play with rockets....

This was a Cub Scout effort that Chris's boys are involved with. One of the Dads, Brian, was there to show them how to build and light off the rockets. We had a couple of different types.

One was a neat contraption that would mix vinegar and baking soda to give off CO2 gas to propel the rocket up. Brian had the idea to shake it up to really mix it...and then it shot off over the trees into the neighbor's yard.

They also built a model rocket with a chemical engine that went quite a bit higher. All the boys had a great time!

If you look at the pictures below, you'll see that their minds weren't on rockets the whole time...but I guess that is to be expected.

We also had an Osprey come by with it's latest catch.

Pictures
Slideshow
and the slide show embedded below...bear with me while I work this out....

Weekends....

Work is work. Week days are all work.

Evening time is homework, house work, cooking, eating, sometimes cleaning, then finding some relaxation after my son goes to bed.

Weekends are where the wild things are. Wild days, wild kids, wild nights, wild adventures, wild relaxation, and wild exhaustion.

Last weekend was a wild Sunday. My Girlfriend and I took the boys and a friend of hers to Mt. Trashmore. Mt. Trashmore is a dump that was converted into a huge park back in the early 70's I think. The boys ride ripstiks, bikes, play games, sports, run up the hill, down the hill, roll down the hill, and more there.

While the kids were playing, the parents were really hard at work keeping track of everyone....
After lunch we grabbed the GPS to find some geocaches!!

We found two caches, but the third eluded us. We had to race back to the house. Chris's boys are in scouts and they had a meeting at 4pm. They were learning about rockets! Meaning, they were going to shoot some off.

More on this later!

Disgusting doesn't even begin to describe it....

I really don't know what the deal is, but my son has been gorging himself lately...when he is not under my supervision. I'm all for him eating more. The problem is that he is eating junk food, candy, etc.

The end result of which is he throws it up the next morning.

Again, not too big of a deal. I figure he'll learn or just get sick of the crud he is consuming, except, this past Saturday morning he vomited something way beyond foul into his BED. I'm already not pleased with having to address the issue at 5am on Saturday. I do not do to well around puke in general. This however was at a whole new level for me. Three times I tried to enter the room, and three times I was half a second away from becoming a secondary contributor. I'm not even sure I had anything to contribute, but I was certainly in danger of trying.

I had to knock the smell down somehow. Here is what I did. I went looking for an odor neutralizer, but found the Lysol. It did the trick. I sprayed it into the doorway of his room and took tentative steps in. So far so good. I kept up the tactic and doused whatever foul mixture exploded from my son's stomach. I then wrapped the whole thing up in the sheet and sped off to the washing machine. I'm not even going to try to bring his pillow back. Toxic Waste at this point.

So if you find yourself in this spot, and I sincerely hope you don't, Lysol or some strong odor neutralizer should get you to where you can take care of the problem without becoming part of the problem.

Fun, Sun, and more....

Saturday was awesome. Saturday was warm. Saturday was sunny. Saturday we went to Richmond :-)

This story is mostly in pictures....and it is lengthy.

Our first stop was here:
The Virginia Aviation Museum
The museum has the COOLEST dioramas.



There are some fun interactive features too...like this Piper Brandon is in...
Or the flight simulator Brandon and John are playing (there are actually 3-4 of these there).

And Michael is exploring the planes on display inside.There is much more inside, engines, planes, a helicopter, models, etc. You have to go and see it!
Outside there is a F-14 Tomcat and a SR-71 Blackbird.

Chris and Michael in front of the SR-71. Worlds fastest jet. There are too many cool facts about this plane to tell here.After the museum we meandered over to Belle Isle in downtown Richmond, on the James River. You get to the island by suspended bridge, but the island was closed. With the snow this week we think there was a chance of flooding. However, there were plenty of geocaches to find on the north bank of the river. Plus there is a Civil War museum.



There were all kinds of things to climb on, rocks to jump about on, and we found three geocaches. Two micros and one ghost cache. If the trees had been in bloom it would have been prettier, but it was a fantastic day overall. The boy LOVED it. There was so much to see, do, and explore.




This was our ghost cache. A ghost cache is one where you just log that you were at the spot. This one was titled 'To bind up the Nations wounds". Abraham Lincoln came to Richmond just after the Confederate Army surrendered, to see the devastation of Richmond. Three days later he was assassinated.
The museum at this spot is fantastic. They have a cool spot with post it notes where you can write something and leave it there. :-)

We took so many more cool pictures, but I'm not going to show them all here. If you get a chance, Richmond is well worth a visit!

I have some friends in Richmond, but couldn't get any to come out and play with us! Maybe next time. Sunday was recovery from Saturday and the daylight savings time change. Nice to have another hour of daylight in the afternoon.

-Mike