Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Our Week of Fieldtrips . . . Valley Forge

This week our neighbor, Judy, is watching a friend's daughter, L. Since L and my girls are friends, Judy suggested that we plan fun things to do together this week, and so, our week of Field Trips was born . . .

We started the week, by going to Valley Forge National Park Monday.

We spent some time at the museum, then worked on the Junior Ranger books. While we were still working on them, they announced a video starting in a few minutes and the girls wanted to go to that, so we did that.

When we left the "theater", an employee stopped us and asked if we wanted to hear a story (silly question for a group of children LOL). So he motioned us over to a bench with some other people and proceeded to tell us a story about a spy during the war. Even got the girls involved in the story, so it was fun.

After the story, we got in the car and began our driving tour. Last time we were there, with my parents, we'd gotten a CD that is a driving tour of the park. It is AWESOME!! I enjoyed it just as much this time as I did the first time (except this time I was driving so had to pay attention to where I was supposed to go. Last time Dad was driving LOL). It was a HOT day!! (but not rainy like predicted, though there were points when I would have happily accepted rain to cool us down) But we had a good time.

The cabin we could go in to see what it was like was rather claustrophobic. The top bunk was one thing, but the middle and bottom bunks were SOO close together. See Little Bit sitting on the middle bunk in the picture? Sassy laid on the bottom bunk at one point for a picture but I couldn't get everyone to actually STAY STILL enough to get that one without it being blurry. It was dark in the cabin which made it harder too since my phone doesn't have a flash, but it showed how tight they were.

The other "tight quarters" that struck us was when we went through the house that George Washington actually stayed in while at Valley Forge. It's a nice enough house, until you consider there were TWENTY FIVE people staying in that house. Then the walls just REALLY close in LOL. But still, always one of my favorite things, to see how people lived back then. The guy who was in the summer kitchen to tell us about it, said that some HUGE percentage (40% sticks in my mind, but I could be remembering wrong) of women's deaths in that time period were because of burns from fires, mainly cooking fires. He said sparks would catch their skirts on fire and such, and then they didn't have the germ theory and such enough to keep the burns clean so they became infected.

And one final picture. L decided to teach Little Bit to salute LOL. Sassy was shocked that Little Bit actually did what L said, hee hee.

After we finished our fun at Valley Forge, and stopped back by the Visitor Center to turn in the girls' Junior Ranger books and get their badges, we had a yummy lunch at Baja Fresh before heading home. A fun day all around. And we've been having more fun the rest of the week, I'll get it all blogged eventually, but all this fun doesn't leave a lot of time for blogging LOL.

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