That History Town

There's 104 days of summer vacation and school comes along just to end it.

So the annual question for our generation is finding the best way to spend it.

Labor day was our last day of summer vacation. This year felt lie the endless summer with the kids getting out way back at Memorial Day weekend and then not having to go back to school until Labor Day. A true full summer vacation.  My vision of homeschooling slipped away again this year, but why not have that last day of summer, be a little educational

So we went to "that History town" as Azalea likes to refer to Harpers Ferry.

I tried to give the kids a Wikipedia synopsis of Harper's Ferry's  history while they were strapped into their seatbelts. They had no way to get out of the moving car while I fill them with important facts about Frederick Douglass and the Civil War.

While Azalea was pretty excited and Tigo was intrugued, yet frightened, we skipped the Ghost Tours.

You don't have to look too far to see where the stone for these old buildings came from. And if you look close enough there is one of the earliest billboards around. They have never been pretty, especially when they are painted permanently on the side of a mountain.

What good is visiting a small tourist town with out checking out the trinket stores, where you can get all the things that you don't need.

But I do love when I see that there are still stores that haven't subscribed to the overbearing world of credit cards and corporations.

 

And then there are the amazing rivers. The Shenandoah River flows into the Patomack (or Potomac for y'all in the new millenium). The rivers are so beautiful and gently flowing into rapids. Next summer we will most definitely be doing many tubing trips down the Shenandoah.

West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia meet here.

My silly peeps.

We are all about rock stacking. It was a favorite of ours in NM, so it was pretty cool to see this amazing random display on a weird obscure wall.

 

The last time I came to Harpers Ferry was over 15 years ago and I went camping with my friend Tiffany. If I remember correctly, we checked out the town, then hiked up the mountain, and found some random patch of forest floor to sleep on and told ghost stories, freaked each other out and claimed we heard a bear in the night. Exploration changes form with kids.