Wrapping Up, Heading Home

Our last full day of the retreat was a day of no plans. We slept in, I tackled most of the laundry (again), and started the packing process. We continued to watch basketball (did I mention that having 4 televisions with cable helped tremendously with a fun opening weekend for the NCAA tournament? It would have been a real bummer at home since they took so many games off of CBS and we don't have cable!). We also took a drive and made some time to see the "glass house" - highly recommended by the MOMYS family from Iowa that we had gotten to know a little during the week. The glass house is near Historic Jamestowne and is a replica of a glass-making set up that was found there. Two men were stoking the kiln (fire?) and working with the glass. They would take what looked like a little "ball" of hot glass out of the fire, and blow, roll, contort it into large vases, pitchers and more. Truly amazing, and truly hot. I can't imagine what it is like for them in the heat of summer.

Side note: Eric and I got a date-night Saturday! We ate at Panera - yummmmmmm. We had both eaten there separately but never had a chance to together. Once again, highly recommend taking grandparents on a vacation!

Sunday morning was stuffing everything into the vans and trying to get on the road as early as possible. I got up early to cook the cinnamon rolls that I had bought but never used during the week, thinking that would be a nice way to ease the "we're leaving" morning blues. However, the best-laid plans...etc. I put the rolls into two pans that were in the townhouse kitchen. Timer beeped, I got them out, set them on the stove-top, turned around to look for a knife to spread the icing on, PAN EXPLODED. Yeah, not cool. Glass everywhere. Thankfully, the kids were not awake yet and I didn't get cut or anything. Eric and I cleaned it all up, dumped the rolls in the trash and he went and got donuts. : )

We had a pretty nice ride home -- the kids did absolutely GREAT the whole trip in the van, barely any arguing and "are we there yet"s. The two negatives were detouring to Monticello for a "drive-by" and realizing that you couldn't see it from your car and it cost an arm and a leg to see it, and my incident at a gas station in SE Ohio where the van-lock alarm went off and Eric was in the bathroom and I could NOT get that thing to go off no matter what we tried. : ) Those are the memory makers, though!

We did stop at a great attraction in WV, and got a good workout climbing down quite a few stairs to see the old and new bridges. The kids didn't think it would be anything to climb back up, (even after reading the warning signs), but we were all quite winded.

We got home at around 9:30 p.m. or so, ready to be home but sad to be ending our adventures. Many, many request of "Can we go back next year?" I'm sure we would enjoy it, but if I know us, I think we will have to strike out somewhere we've never been.