2021 IL, MO, AR, AL, MS, TN, GA, KY Vacation

Since we didn't know what the code situation would look like, we decided that we would just start hitting some states that we've never been to. Mississippi and Alabama were two of them that stuck out as a sore thumb on our map because we had been to most of the states surrounding them so we chose a route and planned on hitting something in every state. What an interesting vacation and we had so much fun. 

I was looking at a blog and saw that

Arkansas has some fun gem mining places. We decided to go there since it's more rural and fewer people. 

Fist stop, grandma and grandpa's!! 

As we were driving to St louis, we saw an interesting sign on the side of the road. It was a cute little city of the world's largest...

I knew we had a pretty decent camp site viewing in St louis. We were able to see all of the Arch from our campground, and walk about a mile and a quarter right to it. If it weren't 97°, it would have been much more enjoyable although we loved our time there. 

We did a lot of walking around the city. Easily over 10 miles each day, and aside from the heat and thirst, the boys almost never complained. Even Atlas walk without complaining this entire trip pretty much. We walked all over got to see the baseball field, a lot of sculptures, and went to the coolest museum called City Museum that we spent many hours at. 

After a few nights in Kansas city, we drove to the middle of nowhere in arkansas. There were no highways so it took us about 9 hours. I think. It's been about 2 months since then. I kept googling something interesting to see, like I normally do on road trips, but it only came up as being billed the world's loneliest highway. We did get to see some planes crop dusting the fields so that was pretty cool. But the trip felt like it was 14 hours. 

Our AR stop was that a place called Ron Coleman's Crystal mining. They have a commercial mining business and then take all the leftovers and just dump it and you pay a small amount of money and can dig through the piles of dirt to find your own treasures.  This was the highlight for atlas. I knew it would be. We didn't tell the boys where we were going until we got close, actually, we bought a whole bunch of things for mining and gave them one thing at a time to see if they could guess. It wasn't until atlas got to pick ax that he realized what it was. Ares had known the secret for a few months he did a great job keeping it quiet.

2020 New England Vacation - Mass and RI

 .... continued

We had to do this on a weekend because Adam was in the middle of teaching a class.  We loved the campground in Maine, but WOW, the campground in Massachusetts was even more incredible.  Playgrounds, 3 pools, awesome bike course, disk golf, RC car park, I can't even remember what else.  Incredible place. We did have a 4 minute rain storm.  NO wind, no warning, just a downpour of rain.  And for some reason, ONLY our awning broke.  It was so disappointing.  No one else's broke.  Some people's walmart awnings broke, like, the $80 disconnected ones, but ours was the ONLY RV oe that collapsed.  Womp Womp.  

Because of covid, we had to schedule our pool times 

Ares won a competition at the BMX park

While we were in the Boston Area, we met up with Brianda, Frank and Anya for dinner.  They picked an awesome seafood restaurant right by the Mayflower II that just got restored and Plymouth Rock.  We had a really awesome evening with them, and wish it wasn't Covid times because we'd have liked to spend more time with them.  We did walk around the town a little bit.  

Both boys liked looking at the decorative seashells.  Especially Atlas

Adam and Brianda had Oyster shooters.  Frank and I passed. 

In Rhode Island we had to drive around looking for a place to park because all parking lots in Rhode Island were closed to people outside of Rhode Island.  You had to show a drivers license to park.  We found some street parking and got out to walk the beach.  We had a really enjoyable time, although when the sun went down it got a little chilly, but we still had to stop and get ice cream.   We literally only drove here to cross the state off of our list, but we did enjoy our time. 

All over the beach, there were piles of rocks stacked up, so we decided to add our own piles.  Well, the boys did.  Of course, after we got back to Ohio, we learn that this is bad for the environment and sea animals and stuff.  Oops.  we will try not to do it again.  Hopefully the surf took it down without hurting any sealife. 

Rhode Island. The camera couldn't pick up the 
most beautiful sunset. 

Of course we had to find ice cream/gelato.
Ares had to get soft serve b/c of their nut policy. 
poor kid. 

This is actually the last photo of the vacation. 
The boys got to swim in Lake Ontario, the last lake of the summer. they went in all great lakes in one summer. 

The campground had lots of fun art activities that
you could bring back to your campsite and complete.
Atlas made a snake. He took A LOT of time on it. 

We took a self guided (read: we got ourselves lost) in Boston one evening.  We found a little map and walked ourselves around at night.  We probably walked about 11 miles in a few hours.  We found a souvenirs shop and found a closed Hard Rock Cafe (thanks Covid) and lots of REALLY busy cafe's that we didn't feel comfortable enough to go into.  Boston was so much fun, there was so much history, the city was unbelievably lively and populated.  We had a great time, but it was a bit busy and we did a LOT of walking and probably stayed out a little too late.  

Right next to the Gillette stadium is the ocean spray bogs

these are definitely my boys. 
Man, I love them SO much.  I took the rental car and them
to do a quick trip to the stadium while Adam worked for the day, I only worked for 4 hours. 

After we were done in Boston, we took the awning, rolled it up, put it through the back window, and started driving home.  We stopped in New York for a night, and stayed in a super shady campground for a fast night, then made it to Lake Ontario so that the boys could wade in the very cold water so they could say they swam in every great lake during the summer of 2020, and then got home.  

I keep saying this... and I'm going to continue saying this.  Everyone hates 2020, and it has been a crappy year for so many people, but it has been, the LEAST stressful year of my life.  I have my kids with me, I'm not stuck in 90 minutes of traffic, I'm not missing rushing dinner, or missing dinner to get the kids to practice on time.  I'm not despising Adam for not having to rush from here to there and having the stress of accidentally forgetting something for a practice or not feeding a kid or, or, or, .... I actually don't mind teaching Atlas.  I know he's picking things up quickly (maybe not health or science, because I don't enjoy teaching that, but reading and math and sometimes social studies! haha!!)

Anyhow, this vacation, kind of thrown together, in about 3 weeks, was pretty awesome, and I only used 20  hours of PTO, and Adam only used about 12 hours of PTO for the entire vacation.  Not bad at all. =)