Day: August 21, 2014

Turkey Tracks:  August 21, 2014

They Came and They Went

 

This blog has been fairly silent since I’ve had my oldest son and my two oldest grandchildren here “summering.”

I picked up Mike and the grandsons in Portland, and the fun began.

 

One of the first things we did was to go mushrooming for black trumpets and golden chanterelles:

I love this picture of the boys.  You can see in their faces the men they will become.

We dried the bounty, and Mike took them home when he left–leaving me the two grandsons for two weeks.

The big draw was the Camden Yacht Club Sailing Camp–their second year and their third year of sailing lessons.

Here’s a gorgeous photo Mike took of the harbor one morning, looking back to the mountains, which are covered with clouds.

The boys swam most days in the morning during the camp–which involves VERY cold water.  So we lowered the temps in the hot tub (children under 12 don’t have the body temperature alarms that adults have) and let them use it to warm up daily.  They soon discovered the pleasures of skinny dipping in the hot tub and thought themselves very naughty.

 

L&H Burger in Rockland, Maine, was also a great spot to warm up–or so the kiddos claimed.  The milkshakes here are just the right size for kiddos to have with their burgers and fries.  One of my own memories is my dad taking us swimming on Saturday morning at Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, Louisiana, and buying us cheeseburgers (with dill pickles inside), fries, and chocolate milk shakes.  I can taste that meal to this day.

We had one artist excursion downtown–here they are looking back into the amphitheater.

And here’s at least one thing among many they could sketch:

 

Low tide in the harbor and skipping rocks proved to be a much bigger draw for them however:

They could almost cross the river on the exposed rocks, if I had let them.  The seaweed, though, is very slippery and there are barnacles…

Archery was of huge interest this year.  I bought them 22-pound recurve bows and good arrows, which was just about right for them.  We had to do You Tube research to figure out how to string them, how to knock the arrows, etc.

These bows are not play toys and can shoot really far and really powerfully, as you can see from this little video:

Here’s what happens when you misuse a bow by stretching and releasing without knocking an arrow in an effort to tease your brother:

Lesson learned.

We also kayaked, swam, explored, and read aloud the whole of a nearly 500-page book that Kelly needed to have read by the start of school on Monday, August 18th.

I will go on record to say that I am appalled that schools are getting out in mid June and starting back in mid August.  Kids need time to be kids, and they learn important lessons–or can–if immersed in nature.  This move is NOT about kids, or lost learning over the summer–it’s about working adults who need child care.  And it’s about creating a whole nation of disciplined subjects whose sole purpose in life is to WORK, not to live their lives outside of work.  Rant ended.

I don’t have pics of kayaking or swimming–I just got too busy and wrangling the kayaks with two boys underfoot isn’t easy.  There isn’t so much they can do to help, and they are like puppies when they have free time and are kept in one area–wrestling, etc.

Here’s a pic of Pirate Bo on the last day of sailing camp.  (They dug up a treasure chest in the sand and found “treasure.”)

After a pizza lunch, they headed for the airport and home.

 

It was a good, good trip to Maine.