Spring Break 2016
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We started Robert's spring break a little bit early with a student-led, parent teacher conference. After our Friday afternoon conference (a new experience which went well), we drove up to New Jersey for a cool event that Harry clued us into: Kidtooning. We drove to Jersey City and took the ferry right downtown on Saturday. The event was in One World Financial Center, the headquarters of Condé Nast. Which has a great view. |
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Kidtooning is when the New Yorker sells crazy cheap tickets for kids to come and cartoon with their cartoonists. We met Emily Flake, Danny Shanahan and Corey Pandolph. The cartoonists collected people, places and things from the audience, demonstrated a couple ways to combine them, then asked each of the kids to come up and request a cartoon from those suggestions. Robert now has a Corey Pandolph original, "Houston, we have a Trumparina." If it shows up in the New Yorker you know where the idea came from. (Robert thought to combine a ballarina, space and Trump's hair — the caption is Robert's idea also.) |
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| We spent Sunday relaxing with Harry and Elle and watching Marx Brothers movies. Robert did a brief report on Groucho Marx for school earlier this year, and Harry is a big fan. |
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Monday we headed back to Alexandria by way of Diggerland: all the construction vehicles a kid (and his parents) could ever want to drive:
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| Clearly the winner was driving the backhoe around; there were almost no lines (first weekend in their season), so Robert got four trips around: he only hit the wall with the shovel twice — two perfect runs! |
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They have a few other things going on there: the forklift, lift (up about 65 feet) and a ropes course in the same style as Stone Mountain (where we were last Spring Break). We dropped off Sarah (who had to work the rest of the week) and packed up some more clothes, then Robert and I headed south. We stopped in Richmond to say hi to Martha. And as he was looking for things to do around Richmond, Robert found a paintball place. He's been talking about paintball for awhile. They opened late on Wednesday so we had time for a quick visit to the Science Museum before shooting each other. Paintballs, or in this case Z-balls: foam balls without the paint, hurt when they hit you. And you can get some cool welts... |
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| We left Richmond Thursday headed for Sevierville, TN. We spent a little bit of time on the Blue Ridge Parkway; since we were not in any rush. |
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And we stopped at Natural Bridge, as it was sort of on the way. We made it with time to check out the outdoor Indian exhibit, which included ring toss. We checked in to Wilderness at the Smokies about 10:30 Thursday night. The water-park was closed, but we were pretty tired. The next day, we spent a lot of time in the indoor water park. The nice guy at the front desk pointed out that it's a long hallway to the water-park, but just keep going...
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| We made it down the hallway and found a cool indoor water-park. |
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Wave pool, surf wave, big water bucket dumper and lots of slides. Outside the water-park, there is an arcade with climbing structures, ropes course (same style as Diggerland and Stone Mountain), arcade games and black light mini-golf. |
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| The black light mini-golf tripped up Robert. Literally. He was still limping the next day so we spent Saturday morning at the local urgent care. No break or fracture; we taped up his foot and kept playing. The outdoor water-park opened on Saturday so that was our afternoon: wave pool, lazy river and more slides. |
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Check out the video Robert posted of the slides. (He also posted a surf wave video.) We came back Sunday by way of The Great Smokies National Park, which lived up to it's name: lots of fog in the beautiful mountains. A fun way to spend a week! |
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Vacation notes:
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