We started our summer in Monroe Michigan, which is about a 50-minute drive from the kids, the end of June we grabbed the grandkids and took them down to Bowling Green Ohio to camp at Fire Lake for a week. One day we drove over to the Earths Crack, that’s what they call it, the Seneca Caverns, and took a tour of the caverns. There are very few manmade steps in the caves most of the time you are climbing up or down the rocks, which the kids loved, we ended up going down about 8 levels to about 135 feet below the surface to an underground river that the kids got to stick there hands in. It was a really nice tour and we had a great guide which helped, after crawling through one of the smaller openings the kids decided to call it “The Fat Mans Squeeze” the guide liked that and said that she was going to start calling it that.
After lunch Nick decided that he wanted to see Lake Eire, so we drove over to Marblehead Lighthouse near Sandusky. The Lighthouse is now controlled by the state of Ohio and is open everyday to the public. After about a hundred steps the kids and I were at the top and enjoying a wonderful breeze to go with the view, Cathy said that she had to stay down below to take the pictures. We also found a Confederate Cemetery, yep in Ohio, on a small island in Lake Erie.Another day was spent at the Toledo Zoo, but it was a hot, hot, hot day and it was also some type of Freebee day so it was very crowded, meaning that we only stayed they for about two hours, to kill some time we went to Perrysburg and stopped at the 577 Foundation. This is an estate that was left by a lady to preserve the land and prevent a bunch of condo’s from spring up on the river, it has a lot of artsy type things here from painters, sculptures and such, but it also has a garage that has been converted into a used book store where you just make a donation, a 150 year old log cabin, a fossil pit for
the kids to dig in and take home what ever they find. A large garden with special areas for the kids, a green house with a fishpond, a river walk, trails and much more. We ended up spending about 2 ½ hours there and kids liked it better then the zoo.
Another day we took them over to the historic river canal town of Grand Rapids, we walked a trail along the canal, saw the old locks and then took an ice cream break, it seems like what ever we do with the kids ends up with Ice cream. After a fun week in Ohio we took the kids home so they could rest for a day before heading to Oscoda for the Fourth of July family outing. We parked the motor home in their drive and watched the pets for the week, this also gave Cathy time to work on the garden and me time to rip all the carpet out of the motor home and replace it with a Prego type of tile, also on a very personal note I installed a new toilet, a state of the art full size porcelain one.
After a week in of hiding in West Branch we moved down to Lapeer where we will been for a month, of course the first week the kids were here, we did a day trip picnic to Port Huron to do some swimming and watching the big boats go by.Back in SE Michigan we took the kids to the Henry Ford Museum for the Baseball Hall of Fame’s touring show, I think Nick could have spent another 5 hours there trying to read and see everything they had on display.
Other then that we’ve just been lying around doing nothing.
