The Skuggs of War

We haven't written for three weeks since it has been so busy, but now we have a normal Sunday, so here it all goes.

Three weeks ago we spent most of our time getting ready for Dan's wedding. We packed and got a dog sitter and stopped the mail and everything.

Our plan to get there was to ride on a series of trains. It should have taken three days each direction, however, the trains on the way there were all delayed. The first was 6+hours late and caused us to miss our connection.

We had to have a 24 hour layover in Chicago because of the delay so we went to the Chicago zoo most of the day. It was pretty fun even though the kids whined a lot.

We got on the next train and it was also running late, but not so late that we missed the third train. It ended up taking 4 days to get there due to the super long layover.

Grandpa Mike picked us up at the train station, so we got to bed before midnight on Thursday.

Having missed a day meant that we tried to get two days worth of touring done in one day on Friday, so we first went to see Button Shy games across the border in New Jersey. Jason Tagmire wasn't there, so we just looked around and bought some games and a T-Shirt.

After Button Shy games we had panzerotti at the Italian restaurant next door to the game store. They are pretty much deep fried calzones. They were super greasy but also super tasty, so most of us enjoyed them (Gideon did not)

Net we went into Philadelphia in order to see as many historic things as we could. We saw the Liberty bell, Independence Hall, and other historic sites. One of the big highlights of the trip was the Benjamin Franklin museum, which had a lot of exhibits about all of the things that Benjamin "Skuggs" Franklin was into.

For those of you who don't know, skuggs means squirrels in the dialect of English that Benjamin Franklin spoke, and he was totally a friend of the squirrels, so I think that he would approve of the moniker. He liked squirrels so much that there were anthropomorphic squirrels all over the museum. We enjoyed trying to find them all.

After all of the historic things that we saw we went to a park where there was going to be a lantern festival later in the day. We saw lots of cool statues which might have technically been lanterns, and then we went back to the hotel so that Mike and Alison could go to the family dinner for adults.

We sat with and talked to Leah's uncle during the dinner and things went well. He was quite entertaining and also asked us if we were religiously opposed to dancing, so all around it was good.

The next day was the wedding. The wedding started at noon, so we mostly just went there after breakfast. All of the kids were pretty happy most of the time except for Lizzy, who was only sometimes happy. The ceremony went well, and we all had a good time. The reception was fun, and we all danced, ate, talked, and hunted fireflies in the field beside the venue.

On Sunday we no longer had our rental car, and we hadn't planned how to get to church carefully, so we realized in the morning that the nearest church was too far away to reach in time using the available public transportation, so instead of attending church we walked across the road to a state part and hung out in a place that was close to the hotel, but which was also a pretty cool creek.

Most of the kids were super grumpy most of the time that we were there, since it was hot and they wanted to be with their cousins, however, eventually they cheered up and had some fun making things out of clay and river rocks. While there we saw lots of little fish in the stream and also we saw a spotted lanternfly nymph (which we didn't know how to identify at the time, but which was hopping around in a pretty funny way. It must have been a 4th instar because it had interesting bright red and black colors), and also a very large black wasp.

The next morning we left early to go to the train station and caught a train to Washington DC.

Since we had a few hours for our layover before our train to Chicago we decided to go into the city and see some of the sights. After a few false starts we ended up taking the Circulator past the capitol and to the national mall. We drove past the Washington monument, the WW2 memorial, and the Thomas Jefferson memorial. We got off at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial and talked about it and enjoyed it.

As an aside, Sara was pretty grumpy during this trip and didn't want to see any of the things in DC, so when I say we had fun, this includes everyone except for Sara, since she did not want to be there at the time.

We then walked along the tidal basin to the to the MLK Jr memorial, talked about that and enjoyed it, walked through the Korean war Veterans memorial and to the Lincoln memorial. Sara was done, so we left her with the bags as we walked up to the memorial. We talked about what Lincoln did for our country and then we got on a bus back to the union station.

Surprisingly enough the traffic was horrendous, and what we expected to be a 20 minute drive ended up taking more like an hour, and we ended up missing our train to Chicago. This was quite disappointing, however after getting to the station and grabbing our bag we looked at our options.

We saw two possible choices - trying to catch back up with the train in Chicago or just flying straight home. We ended up pricing both, and it was cheaper to fly directly home, so we did so, renting a hotel for that night, and then catching a late plane the next day.

Since we ended up getting back a day earlier than expected Mike went back to work 2 days last week and we were fairly quickly able to get back into the swing of things. Thursday Alison met with her CC people to get ready for the upcoming school year and Friday was park day. On Saturday we celebrated Mike's birthday and Sunday we had a game day at the Wilson's house.

This is already super long, so I will not go into what has happened this week so far - we will save that till the next post. Instead I will end with some pictures: