Taking a Winter Break in Florida

We spent a delightful three weeks in Florida -- two weeks at Fort DeSoto Park near St. Petersburg and a week in Leesburg north of Orlando. The weather was cool on the water with most days very windy, but we still did a lot of bike riding and walking, bird-watching, and shelling along the beach. We found a dozen intact sand dollars which we've NEVER found at the Outer Banks except in the shops. We also found two little starfish and a wide variety of other shells: scallop, clam, oyster, little conchs, and tiny cats paws, etc. If I could find my shell book I could identify them, but alas it's not where I thought it would be. Maybe I gave it away in a purge. I tend to do that.

We had a Great White Egret in our campsite almost every morning and could look out on the boat channel at the White Pelicans and the Great Blue Herons. One morning a Snowy Egret graced us with his "golden slipper" feet giving me a smile.

Glorifying God in the Finger Lakes Region

No matter where we travel in this great country I find myself bursting into song. I call those my "How Great Thou Art" moments. Look at the photos below and ask yourself how you could possibly not glorify God in His creation. And these are just a few of the waterfalls we've seen on our trip. There has been much, much more. When you look around remember that everything you see was created by our great God for our pleasure. He loves us so much He surrounded us with beauty. In our gratitude we must, absolutely must praise and thank Him. 

Our Fresh Air Girls are Visiting from NYC and We're Having a Blast!

It was a great reunion to have our two young friends from the Big Apple visit us again this year. We're in the middle of all kinds of fun: going to Brusters for ice cream, dancing at Skyline Terrace Nursing Home, swimming, picking peaches and blackberries at Marker Miller, visiting the horse ranch to watch Anya and Bianca's riding lessons. Today we're off to the farm to milk a cow and help with other farm chores. And tomorrow will be a marathon of fun: touring Shenandoah Caverns, eating at a Thai restaurant, playing Putt-Putt and going to the Fresh Air swim party. Just take a look at the pictures and you'll see the smiles and know how much fun it is to be a Fresh Air family. (The girls were also interviewed and photographed by the Northern Virginia Daily and will be in the paper. What a souvenir to take home!)

Pick up in Harrisonburg and ready for fun!

Stop at Southern Kitchen for supper and make a couple of new friends.

"Boot Scootin' Boogie" at Skyline Terrace - Line dancing is fun!

Picking apples at Camp Kreitzer.

A bumper crop for making apple sauce.

Enjoying the breeze on the porch at Marker Miller while we wait for Anya and Bianca.

Wow, those blackberries are sweet and good!

Now if we just had a horse or donkey to pull the wagon...

More new friends at the horseback riding facility

Celebrating Anya's big seventh birthday

Our Princess Week is Coming to a Close

Camp Kreitzer Princess Week is nearing it's end. Today is wrap it up today. Mom and Dad return this evening and the princesses will return to their kingdom of Zelienople tomorrow. But we've had a great time including a cousin sleepover:

And a trip out to dinner at a Thai restaurant and to see Les Miserables with the oldest princess:

We enjoyed a fish and chip dinner prepared by our culinary chef :

And we went to a festival in town with dancing in the street, a moon bounce and bounce slide, and a visit to the local museum which was open for the event. The girls also got their picture with town hero Peter Muhlenberg of Revolutionary War fame. What a busy, fun week!

It will be hard to say good-bye to our girls when tomorrow comes, but, hey!, there's still today and more fun in store before the final kisses and hugs.

When Camp Kreitzer is in Session even Rainy Days are Fun!

Camp Kreitzer is in session and it's hard to blog at Les Femmes with five pretty princesses calling for attention. So I haven't been  Instead, we've been doing all sorts of things. Yesterday morning we went to Mass, then the Cracker Barrel for breakfast. After we got home it was clean up time, then into the pool about the time the two little cousins arrived.

After swimming and cousins left we decided to do a secret something related to their mom's birthday which is next week. (I'm not telling her age, but I'll just say it's a prime number which means it's REALLY SPECIAL!) Everybody contributed, but you'll have to wait until Saturday to see what it was in case mom is watching. Shhhhh!

But other things aren't a secret -- like going to the potato chip factory and the  library on Tuesday which was a rainy day and required some inside activities. The parking lot was jammed because the River Bandits Baseball Team was reading to kids in the library lecture room and giving away free tickets. I don't know if we'll make one of their games, but the girls enjoyed the cozy kids' room and almost everybody came home with a few books for quiet time. Even Gramma found a some craft books to give her some good ideas for Camp Kreitzer activities.

Route 11 Potato Chips are the best! (Try the Dill flavored.)

Just ask the potato who makes the best chips. He never lies!

The library was lots of fun too.

It's always great to make a new friend!

 

Free books? All right!

Hiking and Praying the Rosary on North Mountain

After several days of rain and more expected this week, we decided we'd better grab today's good weather and head out for a short hike. Since we've haven't really hiked or even walked much this season we decided to do a one-hour hike into the woods and a one-hour backtrack along the Tuscarora Trail beginning at Route 55 on the Virginia/West Virginia border. On this particular trail that's about 3.5 - 4 miles. (We estimate about half an hour per mile on a medium difficulty trail.)

Since the mountain laurel are in bloom we hoped to get a great show, but except for some bushes at the beginning of the hike they were few and far between and mostly well into the woods. But it was a great two hour walk with some lovely wildflowers that always make me think of Matthew 6. "Solomon in all his glory is not arrayed as one of these!" If you need a lift, go hiking in God's beautiful world. Even before we reached the trail my heart was singing. And once we got started, it was a delight from start to finish.

The Tuscarora trail is blue-blazed and the blazes are helpful. In some places the path was completely overgrown, although it would be hard to get lost because, at this point, Tuscarora runs along the ridge of North Mountain which isn't very wide in many places. We could see down into the valleyoccasionally through the trees.

We were out on the trail about six weeks ago for a short walk without our hiking gear, but these blue and white ties were new. They indicate that there was some kind of event up there on the trail. There was a 100 mile run going from the Shenandoah County Fairgrounds a few weekends ago and we wondered if this was part of their route. Seemed too far but 100 miles is quite a distance so I guess it was possible. There were about half a dozen on the two mile stretch we covered. A butterfly must have thought one was a flower. I tried to get a photo of it flitting around but couldn't get my camera out of my pocket fast enough.

So many beautiful wildflowers. These had lovely yellow stamens hanging down. They weren't abundant, but were like little ruby jewels popping up here and there along the path.

Some of the insects are as decorative as flowers. This fellow was agreeably still. There were some little blue butterflies flitting around like flying flowers, but they did not cooperate as well.

This fellow resembles a caterpillar, but instead of being fuzzy he seems to be wearing armor! Must be a warrior centipede. I can think of a few of our grandkids who would happily have collected him in a pocket.

I only saw this tiny golden star in one place along the path. What a little treasure!

I think this is a wild rose, another rarity as we walked along. It caught my attention on the way back. Hiking on a path where you have to retrace your steps is interesting, because the path looks totally different from the opposite direction. You notice different things about the trail and you see different flowers. You also have a different walk. We started from a gap so the trail was up, up, up until we reached the ridge where it was fairly level. On the way back it was down, down, down. The up is hard on your back; the down is hard on your knees. I was very grateful for my hiking polls!

If you come visit us at Camp Kreitzer, we will happily take you for a walk in the woods and a rosary of thanksgiving for the green cathedral. You can choose the difficulty of the trail from a handicapped accessible paved short hike to the Luray Valley overlook, to a five mile round trip to Kennedy Peak and back, to a walk along a stream, to one of the ridge trails on Massanutten or North Mountain. And if you are very good, we may take you to one of the  frozen custard/ice cream stands. Talk about a guilt-free reward at the end of the trail! Life is best when you take it slow and stop to smell (and photograph) the roses.

Charmed by Cody and Buffalo Bill

We arrived in Cody around noon and checked in at the Ponderosa Campground, a great choice. The pull-through campsites were close together, but adequate and the bathrooms were immaculate, my primary requirement from a campground. The lady who checked us in was a walking tourist magazine and pointed us to all the great places to visit. We had to choose from among a wealth since we only had a day and half before moving on to Yellowstone. We decided to visit the Old West town only a short distance away. All the buildings are authentic, moved from one place or another. They consisted of a school, several settler cottages, a store, the saloon, a blacksmith shop, the carriage house, Curly’s cabin (an Indian guide to General George Custer and one of the few survivors of the Little Big Horn), the cabin used by Butch Cassidy and his hole in the wall gang, and a cemetery. There was a little museum as well as all the buildings. We wandered around for about an hour and a half. One of the most interesting areas was the cemetery where they reburied a number of people exhumed from other places who were important to Cody’s history. They were moved and reburied thanks to the efforts of a number of Cody citizens and organizations. Several have large monuments. There is certainly a sense of pride in Cody and a reverence for their famous sons and daughters.

As we were preparing to leave, a group of teenagers dressed up for a wild west reenactment arrived. Several of the girls looked like saloon babes decked out in satin, feathers, and fishnet stockings. They were making a movie for their English class on western literature. What fun. We hung around for awhile while they planned out what they were going to do. Several were talking about killing off their husbands. After visiting the town we stopped at a shop/museum nearby that features a large miniature display. It had military forts, Indian villages, pioneers travelling across the country, Indian buffalo hunts, Buffalo Bill’s wild west show, and railroads. What a labor of love putting such a display together and there was no entrance fee. A number of the display areas had audio explanations of the scenes. It was a great 45 minute stop and well worth the time.

The next morning after breaking camp and going to Mass at St. Joseph's (which turned out to be a Communion service because the pastor was out of town at a diocesan priests’ meeting), we went to the Buffalo Bill Museum nearby. It will probably be one of my favorite stops of the trip. The museum is divided into sections on Buffalo Bill, the Plains Indians, Firearms, and Western Art. I loved the section on Buffalo Bill. What a man, very much ahead of his time. He supported women’s suffrage, was one of the first to urge the preservation of areas as national parkland, and believed in paying a decent wage to his employees. His wild west show employed about 600 players and the logistics to go with it were astounding. But what I loved most about the man was his love for family. He and his wife had four children and only one grew to be an adult. There was charming letter from his daughter which she wrote shortly before her marriage telling him what a good father he’d been and asking him to love her husband as a son. Later Buffalo Bill wrote a delightful letter to his newborn granddaughter telling her he hoped she would love her granddaddy even though he was noisy and gruff and not be afraid of the shooting because he loved little children. One of my favorite photos in the display was Buffalo Bill dressed as Santa for some school children. After reading all the exhibits on his life, I was especially thrilled to see that the day before he died he was baptized a Catholic by a priest, an old family friend. What a fitting end to this saga of a good man, one of the most unique characters of the wild west.

One comment about our travels west: so many priests have multiple parishes. The Cody priest had his main church, St. Joseph, and two others listed in the bulletin. In many places we’ve visited, the bulletins show two, three, even four parishes being served by one priest. We are so blessed in my diocese to not have this problem – yet. Pray for religious vocations and good Catholic parents who foster them.

Flowers and a Walk for Mother's Day

What a great day! Larry and I borrowed our youngest grandchild (except for the little one coming in August),Marianna, and went over to the Massanutten Mountain Story Trail for the walk out to the observation deck overlooking the Luray Valley. It was windy sweatshirt weather, but sunny and beautiful. Marianna enjoyed blowing bubbles and climbing on the "big wocks" and especially the perfect ending for every outing -- a treat, in this case frozen custard. There's a custard stand on Rte. 211 heading west toward New Market that has the best black rasberry custard. It's my favorite -- even beats out the dreamsicle cones at Katie's in Woodstock. 

I got an even more special treat - my Mother's Day flowers. While most of the mountain laurel wasn't even close to blooming there was one flowering near the parking lot and close to 211 coming out the mountain road were some beautiful phlox. When I got out to photograph them, I got a special bonus. Two species of butterfly. But the gifts weren't over even then. My darling husband made a surf and turf dinner with all the fixin's. Who could ask for anything more?