Dinosaurs, Letterboxing, & The Civil War

As you can probably guess from the title, we have been VERY busy for the past two days! I took yesterday off for a little extra family time. We spent the afternoon at the dinosaur park in Montville (actually only 5 minutes from our house). It's actually more than just dinosaurs, as they continue to add each year! For those who don't know about it, it's a huge nature park that has trails with life-size dinosaurs in the woods (I think there 15 but don't quote me!). At Christmas time, local groups decorate them to raise money for a local charity. They also have a great playground and last year added a splash pad. For inside activities there have panning for gold, digging for fossils, and mining for gems (these are a little pricey though. We did go to a birthday party last March that was a lot of fun and the kids got to bring home the "gems" they found!) .As many times as we have been there, I had never taken a picture of Monty (the t-rex out front, named such because he's in Montville)) in his summer gear: green sunglasses and a cup of coke! Here Tucker poses with him (notice the big grin, on Tucker, not Monty, although Monty's grin is nice, too!))




Tucker really enjoyed the rope climbing web this time and kept going up to the top over and over. Even though it was a little on the cool side, he did enjoy the splash pad too! Mostly he had it to himself! And of course, he loved the water table which he enjoys with Daddy here



This time we actually didn't have ice cream (it was almost 5 pm and we were heading home for supper but typically no visit is complete without an ice cream from their ice cream stand!

Before we even went to the dinosaur park we stopped at Michael's and picked up some supplies for letterboxing. We have been talking about doing this for a long time
(For those who may not know, letterboxing is an activity where you search for hidden letterboxes by following clues; the clues are found at letterboxing.org or atlas quest. Each box has a logbook that you log into with your personal stamp and trail name and a stamp that you then enter into your own logbook). So we picked out our stamp: a little boy and a blue ink pad as well as a journal (really an artist sketch pad); our trail name is Felix and Friends (our cat;s name is Felix and this is the name Tucker wanted-I thought we should have a cat stamp but...)

So on our way home, we stopped at a cemetery that we drive by ALL the time to attempt to find our first letterbox and we managed to find it! It was neat too because this cemetery is on the die of a hill and from the road it looks really tiny but it actually goes back pretty far! There was actually two in this cemetery so we took care of the stamping and journal ling and we were on our way, pretty proud that we found our first 2!

Today we headed to the library for Tucker's prize for reading books this week (a smile stamper) and attempted to get the free library pass to fort Trumbull where we were headed to for Civil War Days. The free pass was already signed out so we headed out to find yet another letterbox that was located near the pond by the library! These things are everywhere! This one was in memory of a young girl who was a girl scout and was actually the Girl Scout stamp which , being a former girl scout, I thought was cool!

We then headed to Fort Trumbull which is in New London and sits on the mouth of Long Island Sound. I tried to find out some basic info to include here: It was built in 1777 and named after the governor at the time, Jonathan Trumbull. During the American Revolutionary War, it was attacked and captured by British forces under the command of Benedict Arnold (Apparently a local boy, I'm sure you all know his story). During the Civil War it served as an organizational center for the Union troops. This weekend was their Civil War re-enactment. The soldiers were all camping in tents outside of the fort and patrolling the fort. We talked to one of them on top of the fort about his gun. Here the 'changing of the guard' so to speak


The fort is actually a really neat place and is incredible on a nice day, like today.
While we there, we tried to find 2 letterboxes (we're becoming addicted!) We couldn't find the first one after a 1/2 hour (!!!) so we tried to find the second one found it right away and got a cool stamp of a cannon! We are definitely having fun doing this!!!

After all this busy-ness we headed home to clean out our garage and tomorrow, it's the rest of the house. Plus, Michael gets the fun task of trying to fix the front door sill where we have termites and he'll be placing all the bait and stakes. Fun, fun, fun!