We were blessed this summer to be able to spend 6 weeks in the States for vacation and to participate in the wedding of Krista's sister. I'll do several posts to recap our summer and bring you up to date since then. We started off with a bang -- a week of appointments taking care of all of our outstanding dental and medical items that are hard for us to deal with in Africa. Then we spent a week in New Hampshire with my dad, my sister's family, my grandma, and Krista's parents. The kids had fun playing with their cousins, riding bikes, swimming and enjoying lots of fun activities in the area. One of the highlights was going to Clark's Trading Post. Our kids are sitting on the black bear that welcomes you to the trading post as you enter.
Clark's Trading Post is famous for their trained black bears. It was impressive watching them work with the bears. Of course, I would do most those tricks too if I was being fed ice cream like them after each performance.
They also got to ride the Segways at the trading post. The all terrain version could be useful here in Africa.
Everyone loves the blaster boats. You can see the mischievous grin on Elayna's face as she heads toward the side to try to soak me.
The girls had their first experience with rock climbing. Kira caught on quickly and made it up the wall several times.
After a long fun day at the trading post, everyone cooled down with huge ice cream cone.
This area of NH is also famous for it's fields of wild lupines. It's amazing to see whole fields filled with these beautiful flowers.
I know I'm biased, but I think our sweet Brynn in the middle of the fields is even more beautiful than the flowers.
Grandpa treated us all to lunch at the Mt. Washington Hotel. Here are all the kids sitting with Grandpa behind the hotel. The hotel sits in the valley at the base of Mt. Washington. This day it was actually clear enough to see the top of the mountain.
We found this big plastic platform while walking around the hotel. It looked to us like a dance floor, so the girls wanted to try their hand at dancing with Grandpa, Papa, and Daddy. After we danced for a while, we learned that it was actually an artificial ice skating "rink".
One of the items on the kids' "to do list" while in the States was to roll down a grassy hill. Living in a sandy country, there's not much grass around or grassy hills to roll down. The day after we got to Grandpa's house, the kids went out in his yard and repeatedly rolled down the little hill in his yard. Well, this hill behind the Mt. Washington Hotel was a like a dream come true. It was a huge gentle hill plush with grass. They couldn't get enough of rolling down this hill with their cousins.
One afternoon, my brother-in-law, Dave, and I decided to go mountain biking. I borrowed my nephew's bike. About 2.5 miles into the woods, I got a flat tire. We discovered that there wasn't any patch kit in the pouch on his bike. We took turns carrying the bike out of the woods. Our first stop after getting out of the woods was the local bike shop to repair the tire and supply the bike with repair items for the future. We had a more successful mountain biking outing a few weeks later in a state park in Maryland near Dave's home.
