Maryland update

Halloween at Ramblin' Pines in Woodbine, MD 10/4/08

Fairy Princess

Zorro

Halloween Hayride

One of Vashti's favorite poses.

Pumpkin Carving at Ramblin' Pines

Shanti with Great Grandmother Johnson

Masonic Temple in Elizabethtown, PA where Brian's grandparents live.

This visitor to our RV was about 3 1/2 inches. Beautiful!

Mini-golf at our Hershey, PA campground...we played a couple of times with Brian's Grandparents and at least every other day during the 2 1/2 weeks we were there. Even the kids were getting hole in 1's on a regular basis!

So much for Brown Widow spiders being a tropical spider....After feeling a sticky web under our picnic table, Brian discovered 3 adult females with a total of 19 eggs and a whole bunch of immature spiders. We still have or "Miss Spider" who currently has 3 eggs after 1 month in captivity. After doing a thorough search, Brian found a couple more of them under our RV with a whole bunch of eggs. Unfortunately, due to their toxic nature and their ability to repoduce quickly and in large quantities, we felt a need to dispose of the ones trying to set up house on our RV.

This is by far the most commercial thing we've done with the kids, but they offer a 20 minute free tour/ride on how Hershey Chocolate is made complete with singing cows. It was interesting to learn about everything Milton Hershey did to help his community especially during the depression.

Beautiful Johnson's

Sitting in a mini race car at the Masonic Temple's Fall Festival.

That's our girl...for every picture that Vashti smiles at us there are about 10 of her making funny faces or refusing to look at the camera (If it's not obvious she has a mouthful of spit bubbles in this one)....We wouldn't want her to be any different!

The kids at the masonic temple.

Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece: Falling Water in western Pennsylvania. At the end of the tour Brian turned to Shanti and said, "So, you know that an architect designed this home. What do you think would be different if it was designed by an engineer?" Shanti promptly replied, "Well, there would be posts all over the place." That particular point was not mentioned during the tour, and it is a great example of "worldschooling/unschooling" in action!

We are currently camped at Ramblin' Pines in Woodbine, MD which is a little west of Baltimore and a little north of D.C. Our primary reason for stopping here is they have a huge halloween celebration, and the kids wanted a chance to be around lots of other kids while partaking in a little sugar indulgence (or I should say over-indulgence). This is by far the busiest campground we have visited which is fun, but GOOD GOD WE WISH THEY WOULD TONE DOWN THE CAMPFIRES! It's like living in a chimney for the weekend! We all have stuffy noses and smell so strongly of smoke we can taste it. The entire park is covered with trees so we are slowly smoking ourselves. But not to be party poopers....we ARE having a lot of fun. We've carved a pumpkin, gone on a hayride, trick-or-treated, and played at the park. Once it starts to get dark we get to go on a spook walk, and I've never seen so many halloween decorations. There are fake spider webs and talking, smoking graveyards around every corner. Who knew there were so many pagans in Maryland! Another plus of being in this area is we have seen a lot more Obama supporters....we were starting to feel like outsiders in our own country because rural America sure flies a lot of McCain signs. Tomorrow we are moving down to D.C. for a few days.