Dodge City day! I have waited for this day since early childhood when my dad and I used to listen to old time radio westerns in the car on long drives home. We woke to puffy cotton falling from trees, and young toads hopping all around, the camp cat, and mosquitoes. Swarms of mosquitoes. We take the good with the bad.

Our entire day was dedicated to Dodge City. The town has re-constructed the original town from pictures and writings available from that time. So we did the tourist thing and went to the re-constructed town. The first thing we encountered was an old train engine with no restrictions on how the kids could play on it. They would likely have been happy to play on that train all day, but we wanted to see the town, so we finally pulled them away and crossed the street. It was magical to walk on the cobbled street that was the original Front Street, to look beyond to Boot Hill. There is something magical about walking into history, to imagine Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty and Chester, and all the other fictional folks who help children love to learn history, to walk where their fictional ghost walks still. And oddly enough, the Wild West is the only era of history I actually love. It helps that A Study in Scarlett  nudged my imagination further on, but really, it was Gunsmoke that made me care.

Once inside the town enclosure, we came upon a shoot-out! Ha! Drunk cowboys spilling out of the Long Branch, arguing over whose beer was whose, dancing girls looking on, and suddenly, the sheriff showed up. Shots were fired, and when it was over, only the sheriff survived! Even the dancing girls lay dead. They made their point that the West was a dangerous place, far more dangerous than the movies and radio shows made it out to be, and nobody was excluded.

It was a town like one would imagine. It had a little school house, a great Victorian doll house, a church with a steeple, a town outhouse, an ice cream parlor (we had a non-vegan treat there), a jail, all the little stores old Western towns needed, and, yes, the Long Branch. We lounged around for some time, enjoying the root beer, while one of Miss Kitty*s dancing girls taught Kiki to can can. She was even certified as an official dancing girl substitute in case one of the girls got shot before the show that night!

Rising somewhat ominously above Dodge City is Boot hill. When the town began, and people started to die, they needed a place to put all those dead bodies, and so they took them to Boot Hill and buried them in shallow graves with their boots still on. Most were buried without a coffin.

There is so much history surrounding Dodge city, and most of it is nefarious. It was even founded on vice and expoitation! The US was having trouble keeping the Indians at bay, and they knew that if they destroyed their food supply, buffalo, the Indians would leave. So they sent out Buffalo hunters and set up Fort Dodge. They then discovered that the soldiers became downright unruly when drunk, so alcohol was prohibited. One business savvy man surveyed the financial environment, bought a wagon load of liquor, hauled it across the prairie, and set up shop on the tailgate of his wagon 5 miles outside of Ft. Dodge. That place and that first wagon saloon became Dodge City, and within a very short time, it was a thriving town based on, yep, liquor and women! It was known as the Babylon of the West! The Buffalo were hunted almost to extinction, but that did not mean Dodge City died. Soon enough, the rail road came out, and it came right to Dodge. Texan ranchers drove their cattle to Dodge, and it switched from the Buffalo hunter hangout of the West to the Cowboy hangout of the West. Cattle came to dodge, they were loaded onto cattle cars, the cowboys were paid, and there were plenty of women and saloon owners who wanted their money. For much of this time, there were not law men in the West. Murders were common. In fact, some cowboys thought it was funny to ride around shooting into houses for no reason but the fact that they could. Women were murdered in their beds while their men were in town, their babies left to starve and die. Men and women killed one another in bar fights, there was terrible sanitation and no medical treatment, and so the wounded often died of infections.

Then it all changed. Law men like Wyatt Earp came to town. Within the span of a few years, the combined forces of strong law men, brave clergy, who ddin*t take nonsense off the cowboys, and a Texas cattle sickness calling for a cattle quarantine, and therefore cessation of cattle drives to Dodge, cleaned up the town. People began to settle down, to farm, to raise cattle around Dodge, and the prohibition Kansas began in 1880 finally reached Dodge in 1885. Then most saloons turned into pharmacies. The Wild West was tamed.

After exploring the town all day, we stayed the evening for the ranch house dinner and saloon show. Brandon and the kids got to eat real Kansas BBQ, we got to see Miss Kitty*s variety show, we drank beer at the Long Branch, and Judah spent the entire show shooting at people around him with the cowboy gun he got earlier in the day. We all left a little wilder, a little less lawful, and a far greater, and more sobering, understanding of the way the West was won.

We headed into the wild west today. We wavered on whether to take Interstate 80 or 70 across, or to meander down side roads and local highways, but in the end, we decided to take meandering highways, and to go to Dodge city.

But first, lots of pictures of kids. Everyone wanted their picture taken with everyone else in every possible combination. I began to be distracted, trying to remember exactly how many picture combinations we would have with 7 kids, but they got bored before I could remember what Mrs. Dooley taught me about those figures in algebra 1, so I was saved. I suspect my camera would have run out of memory before we had all those pictures taken.

After a quick stop at Sprouts and Michael*s, we were on our way.

Eastern Colorado is home to feed lots and cattle, as well as a bit of grain. It did not take much to convince the kids that the feed lots were not places anything, even a cow, could be happy in (if happiness is an emotion a cow can feel, which is questionable), and at least such conditions were not we intended by God, one could argue, and so now, when my children see cows munching happily on green grass in wide places, baby cows by their mothers, they yell out, HAPPY COWS! When they see a feed lot or dairy where cows are crammed into a pooopie mess, a mess that smells so bad it turns the stomach of the driver in a closed vehicle, the babies living in little 6×6 cubes, crying for their mothers, they somberly discuss how unkind this is to the cow. It makes so much more sense to a child to see the torment of animals first-hand that to talk about it in the abstract from the kitchen table.

Kansas brought more and more grain fields, rolling hills, and painful flat land. It is strange to look out to the end of the horizon and wish to see some sort of break in the interim, but find none. The ocean has waves and patterns of lines, the mountains have shadows and the texture of nearer and farther away. The horizon on the plains yawns on and on as the same color, the same distance, the same…everything. The variety the eye loves is missing, and therein lies the pain, I suppose. It took a few minutes, but we soon settled into a grateful silence in this invariability. It seemed, in the end, to be just the right amount of beauty.

Kansas really is the Wild West as we think of it. We drove through many small towns, most crumbling, some kept vital, but all appeared unchanged, at least to the imaginative, since the late 1800*s. Part of the endless sameness on out road were the old, un-used wires, held up by glass and dried, bending, cracked, stripped tree trunks, on one side, and the glittering train track on the other. We had a tiny adventure at a railroad crossing when we got to wait for a loooonnnnggggg train to pass, from pulling engines at the beginning, to pushing engines at the end, it was a 5-minute wait watching coal car after coal car. American energy in transit!

And then we came to towns that had familiar names: Hayes, Cimarron, Dodge City. Yes, Dodge City!

The first thing we noticed was that the Arkansas River was dry. Bone dry. This was a little disappointing because it was such a big part of the mythology of the area. After all, the herds of cattle were stopped by the river without the rented lead cow to show the rest it was safe to cross. And, of course, it was not safe to cross. After all, crossing meant a train ride to a slaughter house, for a cow. There are many reasons for the dry river, of course, some of them man-made. The second thing we noticed were the mosquitos. We were about to test the strength of the essential oils I brought with us. My oils worked well enough, but I made far too little! Not that we were eaten alive, but every bite was enormous, and itched quite a bit. I think these mosquitos are tiny minions of Satan, and I am driven to buy DEET on our next trip to the store. Finally, we discovered the camp animals: little toads, and the little tortoise-shell rag doll camp cat!

Dinner as nomads

Today we were with friends. The kids really like this particular group of kids, which makes having 7 kids in one house relatively easy! Our hostess was incredibly kind and made us a hot breakfast before all the kids shuffled off to their kid things. Our girls went with them to Vacation Bible School while Judah discovered that it was trash day and spent a bit of time chasing the truck. He was appalled that the trash man spilled an entire bin of trash on the ground. That has convinced him that our new trash trucks at home are a wise use of funds. He is very opinionated about the matter of trash trucks.

When all the kids and adults gathered again, we took the kids to the community pool. By that time I was convinced that we would buy a house in Fort Collins before leaving town the next day! First, there were bikes lining the front of the community pool. Not just bikes, cargo bikes! And there were moms with more than one kid in their cargo hauler along with all the swimming gear. Second, many people came on foot. These were not people who came by foot out of compulsion. They walked because they WANTED to walk! Third, our friends kept running into people they knew at the pool. This was not an HOA pool, or an apartment complex pool. This is a truly a community pool anyone can join, and really interesting people join it, including our friends!

And these are really unique friends. These are friends who don*t make you feel like some appendage to your husband, or some kind of domestic help tagging along. These are people who get it that some things are serious in life, and other things are not. These friends struggle through the journey of religious practice just like we do, and who, like us, and not content to settle for what is common or easy. These are the kinds of friends we want to live next to. But buying a house in an day on the basis of yearning is impractical and unwise, for some reason I have not thought a lot about (but it must be true, right?), so we satisfied ourselves with searching Zillow while the kids swam.

What a fun pool!

The kids swam until dinner time.

Later, Kiki said, *Thank you for not making us eat vegan for dinner!* Oh my!

What men do when women sew.

After dinner, we went on a tour of Fort Collins Old Town, in case we needed any more convincing that dropping our savings on a house immediately is a great idea.

The icing on the cake for this day was helping with making a skirt for the big sister of the house. I was overjoyed to have such a project, way more overjoyed than my friend, I think, and I got to wallow in getting sewing machines up and running, I played around with a vintage Kenmore, got some sewing in, and was just thinking how awesome it was to hang out while all our kids slept when I realized it was midnight and some people in the house had work in the morning!

What kids do while women sew

Well, that ended that fun.

Sara sewing, and doing a beautiful job of it!

The skirt was finished, and we all went to bed. (I think Sara might have believed the adventure would never end, but she was a good sport the entire time, and was a wonderful student!)

I love road trips. I really love what a person can do when there is freedom to stop and look around, to sleep in the wild, to stand physically very still and notice a million little things. So a road trip is really just a kind of spiritual training for the rest of the year when the craziness of life often makes me forget. When you can take time to see something up close, to touch it, to smell it, to feel it, to roll around it, or to notice it enough to leave it alone, to look and notice what you might step on if your feet are not careful, that is when you have taken enough time. Before that, you have usually (not always) wasted any time you have experiencing something. Or you miss the experience altogether.

This morning we woke to fresh air, the sounds of joyfully clicking beetles in the grasses beside the brook at our campsite, and the bright sun just appearing over the tops of the canyon walls. Popi and the 3 big kids woke earlier than the little Dragon, and I could hear their voices echoing through the air as they scaled the cliffs, and I knew they would go all the way to the top of the rock face towering above our campsite.

Castles towered above our campsite.

The Castle Rock area is an alpine desert where junipers, cactus, pine, river reeds, bears, and snakes all live quite happily together. After I packed up camp, I strapped the little Dragon to my back and we set off on a hike together. When you come from a particular place, and have grown up there, lived close to the earth, away from houses, feasted on native plants, know the way the ground feels to your feet, you have a deep knowledge by acquaintance with the smallest details in your surroundings. When you go to a new place, you do not know anything around you. It is all new, you know it for the first time, but you do not know it well. When you are in an airplane, or when you lodge in hotels away from nature, the texture of the land is lost. The traveler passes by without knowing where he is. After all, from an airplane, one cannot possibly know the wonder of the environment one is traversing. And when one travels from hotel to hotel, the main texture one experiences is painted walls and carpet. There is not much variation in smells, sights, sounds, any sensations. But when a traveler momentarily submits to the goodness of nature, and it has been declared good by the Creator, there is a brand new understanding of the complex variations in the earth, even from one mountain to the next. The Creator implied, *Here, have this good place, take care of it, name it, know it, tend to it. It is Mine, care for it as a good person would.* A road trip, and specifically a camping road trip, is one of the best ways a person can grow to love this good gift of the earth. Not the only way, just one of the best ways. I believe walking the earth would be the best, but then one might neglect all the other good things we have been given to do, like enjoying relationships with others, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick. A road trip is a fine compromise.

There are so many pathways in the wilderness, some made by people, some made by God, all lead somewhere important.

So today I photographed the tiny textures of this place we slept in. We soaked in the smells, the sounds, the tactile sensations, even the taste of the mountain water from the wells at the campground. But I can share what it was like to get on my hands and knees with Mr. Dragon on my back and see the visual complexities of this place.

Peterson*s is famous everywhere!!! Someone put a sticker on the campground dumpster!

Rearing to GO!

There are so many colors here.

Yellow, spiky, soft, reaching, relaxing flowers.

Pink, holding dew drops not yet touched by morning sun.

Orange and red, tall and round, rugged and fancy.

Soft green, but some soft and fragile, some rough and waxy, some tall, layered, reaching, others, slowly building upward, some painful and awakening, others calm and healing, all patterned and perfectly spaced.

Greens giving birth to new life and reaching their arms to the sky.

Some things rebel against and actively resist the pathway, springing up despite violence meant to destroy them. We lay next to these little shoots for quite some time and listened to them quietly grow.

Some creature plants rest gratefully on others, or suck up death and decay to make things beautiful again. Especially notice these amazing lacy, yellow stars. They look large in this picture, but they are about 1/8 of an inch across. I thought maybe eyelashes were the only way to appropriately touch them, and left them alone in the end.

Plants gracefully making way for and nourishing the new, posing as art all the while.

These hairy berries were so inviting. We didn*t touch them, as I was unsure whether our hands would destroy their growth, but looking close showed a coexistence of fragile tendrils against a smooth, protective skin.

Chaos of the scattered pine cones on the forest floor, and the order of a fibonacci pattern when you lay on the ground to see it up close.

Tiny creatures whose perspective is always different than ours.

One cactus in 4 different phases of life simultaneously. The lacy interior of the flower guarded by a green sentinel surrounded by the spikes of war was quite inspiring. I still wanted to eat them, but I left them alone!

So many interesting people have passed this way. Some are more interesting than others!

We finally converged from our various wilderness adventures and I was told that Bunny Boo had hit her head but kept climbing, the Little Magpie scraped her tummy while army crawling up a rock chimney, and the Lion and made it to the top first and yelled down the loudest. Mr. Dragon yelled at them all and chattered with a sparkle in his eye, and I know he was telling them about our adventures.

My Bunny Boo loves living things as much as I do.

We are those people who pull into a campsite at 10:00 pm, without cash, and casually decide to mail a check for the cost of the overnight stay when our vacation is over. I guess we have camped enough to know that it is not a very big deal. The camp host needs enough money to keep his campground spotless, and he could not care less whether he gets his cash now or later, as long as he gets it. So Brandon schmoozed the camp host and was told that we could pay with credit card at the little museum up the road. We cannot resist a cute little museum or Indian relics, so, of course, we went.

These pictures show a map of the hunting grounds in the surrounding mountains (lower left), the Fremont Indian creation story in which God carried people across the ocean to this land (bottom right), and stories of hunting. The older carvings are redder from oxidation, the lighter carvings a few hundred years old at the most.

And this museum was adorable. It commemorated the Fremont Indians who lived there long ago, and these Indians liked to carve pictures in the surrounding rock faces.

Uh, stay on the trail. Hello? Stay on the trail? Whose kids are those, anyway???

There was a tiny little walk through the canyon inlet, gratifying in the many carvings apparent from the walkway, a neat laminated guide page telling us what we were looking at, and a grand finale of a tepee to play in. This museum was all about kids.

Fun things to play with both inside and outside. I think my kids missed their calling as Native American kids.

We were on our way to Fort Collins, Colorado, and needed to leave sooner than the kids liked. We lured them to the car with the promise of many tunnels through the mountains, and the road did not disappoint. We stopped for lunch at an enormous sand stone formation with caves and cliffs and everything our little creatures love to explore.

Look closely. Notice the little native animals scaling the cliff!

Across the road from our lunch spot.

Interstate 70 might be my favorite road through the Rockies because it is right on top of the Colorado and Eagle Rivers. Train tracks perch on the cliff across the river, so you are following rivers, rails, and roads from buttes and torn, red gullies to these perky, green snowy mountains, in Colorado and across the Great Divide. In a matter of hours, the entire world is different. 

We finally made it to Fort Collins and to the hospitality of our friends. The kids promptly fell asleep, and we sat up, enjoying a bit of sleepy discussion with people we would prefer to see far more often, people who do not bat an eye when we ask to stay over and add 6 more people to their 5, and who do not mind us keeping them up for excited kindred chatter.

My little Bunny Boo is about 1/2 way through kindergarten, and we are using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons as her introduction to reading. We have mixed feelings about this reading approach, as it seemed very slow and tedious for very bright children. With our first, we ditched the book after about a week of it and just went straight to 1st grade Rod and Staff language arts curriculum. That worked well for her, as she is a mature, advanced student in general. My second HATED the Teach Your Child to Read approach until he was 5 years old, and then we used it until lesson 50, at which point, already knowing his letters and sounds, he started, and excelled at, Rod and Staff 1st grade language arts.

Enter my Bunny Boo. She is very different from my older two in that she does not have the attention span or desire to learn to read that motivated them. She is the third, the spoiled, babied, beautiful, tiny baby girl, and she is creative beyond belief. She wants to be a kitten and an princess all day long while creating art projects, playing with dolls, and letting everyone else pamper her. And we all happily pamper her. After all, she is the cheeriest, cutest, most precious little 3rd child that ever lived. But she is 5, and she is almost finished with her kindergarten math curriculum, and so it is time to move the reading along. So we pulled out Teach Your Child to Read. She LOVES it! However, Bunny Boo is not the kind of kid who cares to remember little things like what sound the letter i makes. By lesson 20, I was about to blow my brains out. She came to the lessons with the most cheerful, compliant attitude, but as she read the words, she could not remember ANY of the sounds except S and M. We looked at the letters over and over and over again, and still, no dice. She could NOT remember the letter sounds from one day to the next! But we soldiered on, and I was confident that one day it would stick.

And then it happened. I blithely suggested that we backtrack several lessons so we could work a little more on those tricky letters. My Bunny Boo cried and said she was not smart. Hardly anything can make my sunny baby cry, so I knew we had to do something different. I asked her if she wanted to put reading aside for a few months and try again later. Her little determined look and adamant NO eliminated that option. So I dug into my bag of tricks and remembered a man I worked with waaaaayyyyyyy back when I was doing my Level 2 occupational therapy schooling and working with a man who had experienced a stroke and some pretty horrible memory loss with respect to word finding and pairing a word with the correct object. In OT school you learn about memory pegs and re-learning lost skills while performing appropriate life tasks. People rehabilitate while going about their daily lives. This is why games are so important for kids who have trouble learning something. It is a kids job in life to play. It is how they learn. My Bunny Boo is a master of play!

So I made up some cards. I looked online for pictures my Bunny Boo would like and printed a picture for each sound she was learning as well as 10 corresponding letter cards for each picture. So for the picture of a cat, I printed 10 C cards, for the picture of a sun, I printed 10 S cards, and so on. Then I laminated them and cut them out. I used the 1.5×2.5 inch cards from Lakeshore so I could keep them on a ring and organized (I will end up with over 250 cards in the end, maybe more!).

Here is how the games are played:

Game 1 (easiest – 2+ players – no winner):
1. Separate out the letter sounds and corresponding pictures you would like to work on. I would use a minimum of 3 different sounds for a game.
2. Toss the letter cards into a bowl and mix them up.
3. Lay out the picture cards so that you have enough space to stack the corresponding letter cards under each picture card (if you make more than one row of picture cards).
4. Taking turns, draw a card from the bowl, say the sound on the card, and place the letter card below the corresponding picture.
5. Play until all cards have been used up.

Game 2 (easy – 2+ players – no winner):
Play as you would play Game 1, but turn the cards face down below the corresponding pictures so the letter is not showing. In this version, there is no cue to search for when trying to place a card or remember the sound.

Game 3 (harder – 2+ players – there is a winner!) sort of like memory:
1. Each player chooses one or more pictures and lays it/them out in front of him. Your child should choose the pictures for the sounds that are currently difficult.
2. Lay the sound cards corresponding to the chosen pictures out, face down, in rows. You can use as many of the sound cards as you want. You do not have to use all 10 for each picture card. You can use, say, 4 of each, if you just need to review rather than really learn the sounds. The game can work with any even number. Just make sure you use the same number of sound cards for each chosen picture.
3. The first player turns over 2 cards. If either of the cards match that players chosen picture, the player gets to place that card under the picture.
4. If the player finds a card matching one of his pictures, he gets to go again. If he does not, play passes to the next person.
5. Play until all the cards have been picked up. Whoever finds all the cards for all of his chosen pictures first is the winner.
Game 4 (even harder – 2+ players – there is a winner!) this is more like memory:
1. Each player chooses one or more pictures and lays it/them out in front of him. Your child should choose the pictures for the sounds that are currently difficult.
2. Lay the sound cards corresponding to the chosen pictures out, face down, in rows. You can use as many of the sound cards as you want. You do not have to use all 10 for each picture card. You can use, say, 4 of each, if you just need to review rather than really learn the sounds. The game can work with any even number. Just make sure you use the same number of sound cards for each chosen picture.
3. The first player turns over 2 cards. If the cards match each other AND match one of the picture cards, the player gets to keep the pair and place them under the picture card face up.
4. If a player finds a pair matching one of his pictures, he gets to go again. If he does not, play passes to the next person.
5. Play until all the cards have been picked up. Whoever finds all the cards for all of his chosen pictures first is the winner.

Game 5 (hardest – 2+ players – there is a winner!) If you are playing this version, your child should not need to be cued as to what the sounds are on the cards. Do not play this version until he is at that point. This game is simply for reviewing and solidifying known sounds in a fun way.
1. Choose 11 or more picture cards (an odd number of them) and ONE corresponding sound card.
2. Lay out the cards face down.
3. The first person turns over 2 cards. If it is a picture card with a matching sound, the player gets to go again. If the sound and the picture card do not match, play passes to the next person.
4. Play until all the cards have been picked up. Whoever has the most pairs at the end is the winner.

So there you have it. This worked for us after one game. Bunny Boo learned the sounds to the 12 letters she was working in by lesson 25, and we will just add cards as we go. She has not cried since. 🙂

Brandon is leaving tomorrow, so we had to drive down the coast, closer to Portland. We had not yet stopped for lobster, so that was a top priority for lunch. The drive down was just as picturesque as the towns, we found a lobster shack to stop at for lunch, as well as the Bunny’s birthday party. (Her birthday is tomorrow, but Brandon won’t be here tomorrow, so we are celebrating today.)

The lobster was quite lovely. Fortunately, the kids thought it was gross, so we didn’t have to share a single bite with them. The crab shack appeared to have just recently put in the deck we ate on, as the wood was brand new and unweathered. The deck looked out over a bay filled with bright boats and a bustling barge. The kids thought it was a great idea to dangle their feet over the railing and test out their arm strength while risking a 30 foot drop. I put a stop to that!

Bunny Boo loved her presents, opening each quite solemnly, and as we didn’t have a cake for her, we promised to find her some donuts or something equal in the morning. She was satisfied with that arrangement. When you are 5, you are old enough to understand these things and be a big girl about it, I guess.

We drove down the coat until we came to our campground, about 20 minutes from Portland. Yet again, we found ourselves at a beautiful spot, but this time we were right at the edge of the water! This campground was on a peninsula such that each site was either on the water or just across the path from the water, and tents got the best spots! There was also a really fun playground and a small dock for fishing. And Judah did fish, his dream finally coming true! He caught a small piece of sea weed and kept it carefully in his tackle box to look at later.

This is such a wonderful campground, and we wish we had another day here, but we don’t, and so we’ll have to remember this place for another time. Brandon leaves tomorrow, and so we have run out of time in Maine. Tomorrow we officially begin our journey back home, and we will miss our Popi very much over the next few weeks!

At the end of the day, looking like a zombie.

Today we  stayed “home.” It’s so nice to have no firm plans for the day, to be able to stay in one place, to play with the kids without worrying about driving somewhere, no trying to figure out where to stay, just staying in one place. This morning the mosquitoes seem to have gone somewhere else. Maybe they are plotting their attack for tonight! But we are planning to play at the beach all day.

The kids seem to have a little playground kid pack and they’ve been busy planning a soccer game and other things. The kids here are older than I would like them to be for my kids, however I’m really happy they are nice kids. Probably anything my kids learn from these kids won’t harm them too much in the future. My kids are at least following the rules about coming to tell me where they are before they move on to something new. At one point, Kiki came running frantically to me saying that she needed $0.25 in order to buy a piece of candy like all of the other kids. It was pretty cute and so if course I gave her twenty five cents. It has been really fun to see her find kids to play with at campgrounds and developed her social skills with respect strangers.

Brandon took each of the kids to kayaking. Kiki went first, then Judah,  then Sunshine. On their kayak adventures they jumped into the deep water, found lobster traps, and Popi got an amazing work out!

The Screamer and I played on the beach while the kids were kayaking, and met some sweet girls from Holland who travel to the United States every summer to visit their grandparents. They spoke perfect English and were so polite. And of course the Screamer charmed them. He splashed around as the tide came in. On the Maine coast, when the tide comes in or goes out the water level change is so drastic that rivers and inlets completely empty, and the entire shoreline raises and lowers many feet in a very short time. Before we knew it, the Screamer was up to his neck in water when just minutes before he had been on dry land! It was pretty interesting to watch. The water is so calm here that we are able to skip rocks across it and the kids can play without any concerns for waves carrying them off. It is all so beautiful!

After swimming, we came back to camp and chatted with our neighbors. They just came back from the local Celtic festival in Belfast, and we were inspired to go to it. So we gathered our kids from the camp rat pack, fed them some dinner, and headed to town.

Belfast, Maine, is like a living post card.  It’s the stuff of travel magazines and tour books with brightly-colored boats and buildings bordering a perfect bay, surrounded by rolling hills and vintage stone buildings. It is a step back in history.

Most of the festival had closed up for the night by the time we got there, so we settled down on the hillside to watch some Celtic singers while the kids rolled down the hill and played leap frog (they are really into playing this right now). Then there were fireworks over the bay, and by the time it was all over, the kids were about to drop.

However, we couldn’t leave without visiting a local brewery, and Brandon already had his eye on one. While enjoying our snacks and drinks, we noticed some people on their boat lighting floating lanterns and letting them go! Now we have proof that what we saw last night was unlikely to be UFOs. What a perfect ending to a perfect day!

This morning we went to the beach for some true Atlantic Ocean beach fun. We’ve been in bays and seas connected to the Atlantic, but this was the only time we would play in the pure, unprotected, raw Atlantic Ocean. Of course the Screamer fell asleep as we walked down to the water! But who can blame him? The sound of the waves, the beautiful, gentle, northern-latitude sun, squished up against his mama in the carrier – it’s the perfect formula! Popi and the kids splashed around and played in the sand for over an hour, and by the time we left they were filthy and happy. Good thing there were nice showers there!

We next drove up the Maine coast to our campground in Searsport.

It’s not the east most point in the US, but it is really close! Our campground is nice enough, settled on the water with a nice, smooth the rocky beach. There’s a big playground here for the kids to play on and it seems like there are quite a few kids here for them to play with. We can rent kyacs here, as well! There is a sweet little family of 3 camping right next to it was a little boy his just a little bit younger than the lion  and they are each fascinating individuals. There are so many mosquitoes here probably more than any other place he has been . I pulled out my essential oil bug repellent and it’s working very well. That makes me very happy.

My baby gets only a few more days to suck her fingers! When she turns 5, she’s done!