The boys and I undertook a grand adventure over the weekend. We drove to a gorgeous state park where we slept in an ancient log cabin at night and hunted for fossils with a paleontologist during the daytime. In the process, I came to a few realizations: 1. Virginia is a beautiful state, 2. Kids make friends easily, especially in the context of nature and exploration, and most importantly, 3. I am, indeed, the luckiest Mama on the planet. Our guide on the adventure, Dr. Lauck Ward, was just about the coolest scientist I have ever met. He was really funny and didn't make any of us newbies feel like idiots when we asked him to identify a find which turned out to be a piece of rock. It happened a lot at first! He had this great accent and perhaps the highlight of the whole trip for me was when Dr. Ward found a humongous green caterpillar/worm and he wanted to show it to Keller & Casey. Rather than saying, "Come look at this" he looked at me and drawled "Girl, bring your critters!"
Our ultra cool cabin:
We hiked to the beach on Friday evening and were rewarded with some incredible scenery:
Hanging out on the beach at Stratford Hall. The boys had a pretty good mix of playtime and fossil hunting time. As did I.
A few funny highlights for the boys--boat ride to a remote area of the beach to search for fossils & their first ride in the back of a pick-up truck!
Hanging out with new friends and fellow fossil junkies:
We had some great finds--bigger shark teeth than we have found on any of our previous adventures, ray plates, turtle shell, a porpoise tooth, and lots of bone fragments--all from the Miocene period which was about 5 million years ago. Too cool! Here are a few of Keller's finds from the first day:
This is completely unrelated, but Keller found this little guy on our swingset tonight. He appears to be a baby praying mantis.
1 comment:
Wow, that is the coolest vacation! Where was that? Really neat, my daughter would love that! Glad you had a great time.
Heidi
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