Summer Fun: Indian Cave, Bunk Beds, Hershey Chocolate Factory

One of our events was to visit an Indian Echo Cavern. Like I said, we did too much and had so much fun to write about it all...here are just some recaps. 

We were all there! complete with belly!

Mackenzie and Caleb got to sleep on a bunk bed in our little cabin, which was awesome! They're getting on in August so it was a great trial run. And they loved it! This turtle was a rare find so we had to indulge Mackenzie in her love of the green animal. She took it everywhere!

And then Hershey Chocolate World. The first visit was AWESOME. The second visit needs its own post. Another day. But here are some fun family pics:

Caleb loved cousin A...and hand-holding was a frequent occurrence! 

Three generations of women. Kenzie's face cracks me up here!

As excited as a little boy...

Just some more factory fun. 

That's all the pictures we took. I know my siblings took more, but those have yet to be exchanged. The trip was fantastic and we look forward to seeing more family in the future!

Summer Fun: Independence Day with Family

We didn't take any pictures of camping with Justin's parents...we let them do that. So we'll get those sometime in the future. But after 3 days camping, we drove another hour to arrive at the Hart Family Reunion. There's no way to write everything that happened or was laughed about or enjoyed; it was a great visit! My sister planned and organized it all and it was a huge success! We were able to see everybody from my side, though maybe not all on the same day. In these pictures, Grandma had a fabulously kid-friendly craft for the kiddos to create on the 4th of July. 

Kenzie warmed up to Grandpa...and her cousins. Especially the girl cousins. 

Caleb loved playing with his cousins and couldn't run around with them enough. So sweet to see these relationships form and strengthen as the kids get older!

This is my mom BTW. Pretty lady!

Why PA, you may ask? Nobody in my family lives in PA. We like to pick random places around the country to visit and see who has to drive the longest to get there. We didn't win that competition this year!

Summer Fun: Lake Eerie and Traffic Jam

Our drive to PA for camping with Justin's parents and a family reunion with my side was begun the day Justin was out of class. He only had 2 weeks off this summer and we really wanted to take advantage of it! Our car was loaded, complete with suitcases strapped on top, thankfully covered with a tarp! We were rained on a ton while driving, and once we arrived in pa. 

We started by driving to Ohio and spending the night with family friends. We decided to stop at Lake Eerie, since I had never seen a Great Lake before. It was incredible! If YOU have never seen one, you definitely are missing an experience! It was incredible to see this mass of water stretching out past the horizon. I couldn't see the other side of it!! It had waves and moved like the ocean! But it was a lake! So crazy.

We enjoyed some rock-skipping. 

Caleb has always become very calm and contemplative in nature. It's one reason I love camping as a family. It's good for his little spirit. And mine. 

And Mackenzie just loves being where we are. She liked the geese. 

We continued our comfortably slow driving (we only had 6 hours to go that day) not wanting to arrive in PA before Justin's parents, because they had the tent trailer. How much fun would it be to get to a campground and have to sit in the car? Might as well be on the road and not feel bad about it, right? 

Well, we got more than we bargained for in that regard. Somewhere in PA on I-80 there began a terrible traffic jam. There was either a semi on fire or some other unexplained event, but we moved 10 minutes on our GPS travel time in 5 hours. Literally. We luckily were able to find a gas station and get off in the middle of that. At some point I-80 was evacuated and all of the traffic was forced to travel county roads as we bypassed the mysterious accident. There weren't any signs making sure we went the right way, so we just picked out some friendly truckers and made sure we went the way they went. Of course, we had our GPS, so we weren't worried about getting lost; we just wanted to get back to I-80 ASAP!

Instead of arriving at our campsite at 8:00p.m. we arrived at 1:00a.m. But Justin's parents had only been there for about an hour...so maybe it was good that we were stuck in the car driving.