Vacation!

Hello! I have been such a miserable blogger this month, I am wearing the cone of shame. In my defense, I spent the first half of the month on vacation, so I thought I'd share some photos of what we did. Here's the photos of the trip:

Of course, the main reason we went was to visit my parents in Maine. We had a wonderful time that involved LLBean, Popham Beach, blueberry picking, fishing, and lobster. Here we are eating ice cream in Freeport:

Next, we went to Boston to spend the 4th of July weekend with Derick's siblings and their families. Here's Derick and I at Quincy Market:

We were fortunate enough to watch the Boston Pops 4th of July Fireworks Spectacular. The music was awesome, a highlight. If you are in the Oval like we were, you can't see the fireworks well, but that was OK.

Here and there we hiked the Freedom Trail. We also visited the aquarium, which offered multiple opportunities to quote Finding Nemo, and the Science Museum, which was having a special Science of Pixar exhibit. Here's a shot of most of us at the top of the Bunker Hill monument after climbing almost 300 steps:

What you can't see: on the back of Rowan's short is a sweat stain in the shape of my face, which I had wiped right before this picture was taken. By the time we got to the bottom, my legs were Jello. It took days for them to recover.

Later that day we saw a game at Fenway Park:

And the next day we went camping in Vermont on our own at a lovely campground called Townshend S.P., which had a gorgeous CCC-built ranger station and traditional CCC platform text sites. I don't think we've ever stayed at a lovelier campsite.

Camping food was a highlight, of course:

We hiked to the top of Bald Mountain, where I got the only signal I ever got camping at the peak, a text message from a friend of mine. Lola our dog hiked off leash and had to overcome her fear of crossing streams. It was pretty muggy, as you can see by how much I am sweating (check out the finger marks on the bottom of my shirt from where I kept wiping my face):

The men, looking noble at the actual peak:

This was the trip we taught the boys cribbage. In this game  Rowan finally beat me, after numerous skunkings of him by me:

Vermont was mostly muggy with periodic rain, One afternoon was gorgeous, though, so I took the boys swimming at a reservoir. The reservoir was oddly made--a truly slimy bottom made it uncomfortable to walk in, and the bottom was interestingly uneven. Look how far out the boys are yet how shallow it is. I call this the boys walking on water like Jesus photo:

After camping we went to Herkimer, New York, for a day visit to Cooperstown:

And then we drove to St. Ignace, Michigan, for a couple days, one of which we spent at Mackinac Island. We hiked a good part of it.

Rowan obviously forgot to wear his red shirt. LOL

After Mackinac Island, we drove home.

Thank you for letting me share my vacation photos after my pathetic blogging this month! Please visit Write Click Scrapbook this week for a few days where I share how I go about scrapbooking my vacations--click here to read about how I organize the album, and click here to see how I create multiple photo templates. Tomorrow I'll post about how I design the album, and later this week I will post the pages I have been working on in this compressed month for Scrapbook Circle and Simple Scrapper!