Keeping Up With...Family (Friday July 10th)

When I was doing our week 6 of the summer recap, I realized we did a TON on that Friday.  Rather than squeeze it into that recap, I thought the day deserved it's own post.  We had road tripped to Santa Claus Indiana on Thursday and this was our first full day of camping.  Our plan was to hang out around the camp ground for the day.

Our day started with everyone waking up around 6:30am because we were in central time zone so it felt like our normal time to get up.  We were up for about 10 minutes when it started to thunder storm.  That was super fun in a tent!  We quickly got everyone ready and headed out to have a dry breakfast down the road at Denny's.  The day was already stressful but these pancakes made it somewhat better.

While we were eating, we decided to head to Abraham Lincoln's boyhood home which was down the street.  It has stopped raining but was still cloudy and the forecast wasn't good.  We wanted to be away from the campground but still keeping busy.  We had a great time walking all of the trails, seeing what his cabin looked like and learning about his history.  My favorite part was the Trail of 12 stones which had 12 different stones from 12 different important times in Lincoln's life.  Very fun and educational!

The site of Lincoln's log cabin

AJ reading to Daniel about this rock from the White House

Zak & Daniel on a rock from the stage where the Gettysburg Address was delivered

When we finished up there we decided to head into the town of Santa Claus and do all of the things there.  They have a huge Christmas store, a museum about Santa and a candy store.  We enjoyed all three places!  We even got to see Santa and chat with him for a while.  And after the conference, the boys were able to add their names to the "Nice" list.

Selfie with the largest Santa statue

After all of that, the weather was still hit or miss so we decided to head to the movies to see the new Minions movie.  We enjoyed the movie...and LOTS of popcorn.  I was really happy that Zak sat still thru the entire movie.  We were concerned since he's so young but he really likes the Minions & he did great.  We gained an hour by heading back across to Eastern time to see the movie, so instead of 90 minutes it was really only like a 30 minute movie.

When we came out of the movie, the sun was shining and the weather was looking up.  We decided to head back to the camp ground and enjoy some of the stuff that was there.  We played more mini golf, went fishing in the stocked lake (and caught 1 fish), went on a paddle boat ride (exhausting!), made hot dogs and smores over our fire and had a ton of fun!

Daniel's fish

Mini Golf!

When we finally headed to bed that night around 10 it felt like a super long day for us adults.  The kids had a blast and probably would have kept going.  We really packed a lot into one day and were able to make the best of what started out as a stressful situation.  It wasn't the day we had planned but it actually turned out better than we thought it would!