Dadcation
Months ago, we realized Columbus Day weekend meant the children had a few days out of school and that it coincided with my mother-in-law’s 70th birthday, and she wanted her daughters and their families to get together somewhere for a weekend of fun, but we also realized we’d miss seeing Twenty-One Pilots in Atlanta if we were out of town that weekend, but then we additionally realized the band would play in Greenville the preceding evening and that Greenville is on the way to Asheville, which is where…
We left San Francisco and headed south to one of our county’s newest National Parks, Pinnacles. Pinnacles is small in terms of acreage but offers some great hiking trails and rock climbing. It’s also home to endangered condors and bats, among other wildlife, and the trails offer views over the canyons that send warm air currents upward for gliding condors to hover above; their nests are along the tree branches lining the steep walls. There are a couple caves, too, but they were closed during our July visit…
Last Summer, we flew into Denver for over a week of exploring the national parks in Colorado; I wrote a partnered post with Hanes but never fully described the “rest” of the story, so here it is. After we landed, we headed south toward Great Sand Dunes National Park, which shouldn’t have been too bad of a drive on I-25, (about 3.5 hours), but there were wildfires west of us that covered the roads with thick smoke, and before we’d gone too far, we saw signs indicating road…
We pulled into Montgomery, Alabama at the Rosa Parks Library and Museum at 11am on Saturday; a few minutes later, the five of us plus my mother-in-law were inside a city bus simulator traveling through history. We walked through the attached museum and then drove over to the Alabama Department of Archives & History, which has fairly recently been renovated; it had everything from Native American artifacts to Alabama football memorabilia. After lunch, the five of us drove toward Selma, stopping at the halfway point of the historic…
We woke up early (and cold) in our tent on Friday, April 6. It was my 9th soloversary (I like to remember the anniversary of quitting my job and starting my own law firm; it’s also my late maternal grandfather’s birthday), and we had a very difficult-to-book ranger-led canoe trip scheduled for 10am. But first, we ran to the restroom and to check the inside of my parked car, our youngest following behind nervously. The reason we were interested in the inside of my car at sunrise at…
On Tuesday of spring break 2018, we awoke in downtown Richmond and arrived just after 9am at Tredegar Iron Works to see the national park service visitor’s center, so the children could get yet another junior ranger badge whilst we toured where the CSS Virginia (FKA the “USS Merrimack”) was built, along with a whole bunch of cannons for the Civil War. The children (especially the boy) loved putting on Union and Confederate uniforms in the kids’ “dress up” section of the museum and learning about (plus climbing…
We’d barely finished our “Easter eggs Benedict” and put away the chocolate wrappers littering the den area rug when the 5 of us loaded up in my car to head up I-85 north for a Spring Break road trip of national parks in Virginia and the Carolinas. We were still in Gwinnett County, GA when we hit our first patch of traffic, but from what I saw on FaceBook, driving north from Atlanta instead of south toward the Gulf was an infinitely better experience (it was fine the…
We arose at 4:20am, quickly donned winter coats, and headed out for the winding uphill climb to Haleakala Observatory. We parked the car at 5:30am and walked to the observation tower; it was 20-something degrees outside and windy, but we were determined to experience the famous Haleakala sunrise. Unfortunately, the dense cloud cover prevented our seeing quite the sunrise I’ve heard about and seen in pictures, but it was still a worthwhile experience and the first time I’ve seen the sun rise with a bunch of eager strangers…
Rather than fly home to Atlanta and then go to Philly the next day, we changed our flight “home” to go straight to Philadelphia, landing at midnight on Friday night (thanks to a delay at JFK), June 16. Why end a vacation with another vacation? In a word, Bono. I’d seen U2 four times, the first being via a road trip to Memphis in 1997 (with Jim Bob, incidentally, the guy whose family was in Paris with ours in the last series of posts), and the last being…