Enjoying Summertime!

 The moment that Dan and the girls were free from school, we took a 4-day road trip to Pennsylvania. 

My parents joined us for our first two days of travel. Our first stop was Gettysburg. 

The girls posed with President Abraham Lincoln. He looks great with bunny ears.

We visited the museum, including an informative movie and cyclorama - an incredible painting that fills a large room and depicts the bloody "Pickett's Charge" during the Battle of Gettysburg. 

The cyclorama had an audio description of the battle, and sections of the painting were lit up as each scene was described.

We took a bus tour around the entire battlefield, led by a local college history professor who brought the battle to life with his descriptions and stories.

Standing on Little Round Top, overlooking battle sites named Plum Run, Devil's Den, and The Valley of Death. 

After several hours at Gettysburg, we drove an hour and a half to Ronks, PA, where Sight and Sound Theater is located.

Emma and Hallie loved the statue of the lion and the lamb outside the theater.

Sight and Sound performs spectacular musicals based on Bible stories.  We've seen Sampson and Esther in the past, and this time, we watched Noah. It was my parents' first time seeing one of their performances, and they really enjoyed it.

It was awesome!  Granted, they take a lot of liberties filling in the details of the stories from the Bible, but they did a wonderful job of presenting the gospel throughout the performance. The acting and music were fantastic, and their special effects are always over the top!  They surrounded the audience with a life-sized Ark filled with animals!  

After spending the night, my parents headed back home to Virginia. Dan, the girls, and I drove to Lititz, PA, an adorable small town with a couple of factories we wanted to visit.

Our first stop was at Wilbur Chocolate, which we liked better than Hershey chocolate!

We stopped in this train station that was converted to a visitor's center and chatted with the worker there.

Our final stop in Lititz was a tour at the Julius Sturgis Pretzel Bakery.

Our guide told us how Julius Sturgis began his career at a pretzel factory, where they always threw away or fed their animals the hard, crunchy leftover pretzels. Julius liked the taste of the crunchy pretzels and made his own business baking and selling them. 

We were given a dough ball to form and twist into pretzels.

Then we saw the factory where Julius put his family to work every day.  This dough kneader was built low to the ground for the 4-5 year olds in the family.

The ovens where the pretzels were baked and dried.

At the end of our tour, we were qualified to work!

We left Lititz and enjoyed the scenic countryside and covered bridges on our way to Hershey.

We got to drive through this covered bridge.

Shearer's Covered Bridge was closed to auto traffic, but we were able to walk through it.

It was so pretty inside.

There was a nice memorial park on the other side of the bridge.

We arrived in Hershey that evening and visited Hershey's Chocolate World.

We watched a 3D movie that took us to virtual Candy Lands based on Hershey's treats, and we rode the cute trolley tour ride with the singing cows.  We got samples of Hershey's candy with each experience.

A photo with allll the chocolate!

On our last day in PA, we spent the day at Hershey amusement park. Hallie was barely tall enough to get onto the big "Twizzlers" height rides!  She's a roller coaster junkie, so this was the perfect time to take her!  I'm not sure which rides qualified for the "Jolly Rancher" height, but I don't think we were ready for those anyway.

Our first ride of the day, "Candymonium" sounded adorable. We were completely unprepared for the intensity of this ride, but we all loved it!

The girls had to ride the Scrambler on their own since Dan and I don't do spinning rides.  Emma's hair is expressing its excitement.

Hallie BEGGED for someone to ride the Jolly Rancher Remix ride with her. Dan and Emma said "no way," so I agreed to ride it with her. Even with my eyes tightly shut the entire time, I deeply regretted my decision. But Hallie thought it was the best ride ever!

There was a small zoo at Hershey Park, which the girls loved.  They were so excited to see this lynx, which is Hallie's favorite animal.

They had a cool indoor exhibit of nocturnal desert animals, including bats, owls, snakes, and ocelots. This Black-Footed Ferrett was so cute, curled up in his bowl-shaped bed.

There were several wolves, and one of them ran to chase a bird out of their enclosure. The other one slept right through the excitement.

We could not decide what this was, besides extremely terrifying. We left it where we found it.

That night, Emma had an Unfortunate Incident where she woke up in the middle of the night after she had thrown up in the hotel bed. Hallie was sharing the bed with her, but thankfully the mess stayed mostly on Emma's side. (There were a couple of stuffed animal victims.) Emma woke me up for help, and we managed to get Emma changed and rinsed off, strip the bed, throw a towel on top of it, and get her tucked back into bed without waking up Hallie or Dan. She felt sick the entire ride home, and once we arrived home, she tested positive for strep throat. And as soon as she finished her antibiotic, she got a UTI and had to start a new medication. Poor kid!

Over the next couple of weekends, we had fun family time. We met Dan's siblings and their families at Busch Gardens Water Country for a day.

We babysat our nieces, Naomi and Miriam, for a couple of days and took them to swim at my parents' community pool.

They were having a summer festival with food and games.

There was a small petting zoo.

Face painting

And kid competitions with prizes. Hallie won first place in a race while balancing a potato on a spoon.

Hallie also got to attend clay camp at school in June. She was especially excited that one of her best friends, Fiona, was also attending. They had a great time creating clay figures and tea sets that week.

Dan had three very rough days with Montezuma's Revenge and a fever, and he lost roughly 10 pounds in that short amount of time.  He was feeling much better by the weekend and thought he was ready to get out of the house for a while...until we got to Busch Gardens and it felt like 100 degrees in the shade.

We did get to ride the Big Bad Wolf ride for the first time, but Dan felt terrible afterwards, and he felt so weak that it took us a long time to make our way back to the entrance of the park. Poor guy!

The Virginia summer heat and humidity has been absolutely horrible this summer, and we've avoided spending time outside unless we're in a pool.  The girls did get to spend gift certificates on ice cream and jewelry at the gift shop at Busch Gardens, and then we headed home to rest in the air conditioning!