Category: Roadtrips

Carter and I just got back from her road trip. This time we headed west, and got as far as Columbus, Ohio by way (primarily) of Pennsylvania and New York. Along the way we visited a lot of cool places, which I plan to post about in upcoming posts. It was a great time - but we're happy to be home. The weather cooperated for the whole trip, although the temperature was all over the place - on the first couple of days it was in the eighties, but the rest of the trip was fifties and sixties at best. Ohio was a new state for me, and I've got to say that I liked it. Very scenic, and everyone there was super-friendly. So good job, Ohio!

Another of our stops was Hershey's Chocolate World in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Sean got to design his own chocolate bar (including a custom wrapper), and got to watch it move down the factory line. It was a bigger place than I expected from the website, but that was actually good. Sean thought the "Chocolate Tasting Adventure" we did was pretty fun too. He liked that we had to eat the chocolate so "fancy".

We also visited the Adventure Aquarium in Camden, NJ. It was pretty amazing, but we somehow neglected to take any pictures other than this one. Sean really dug this thing though - there were bubbles on the underside of the tank that he could pop up inside of and look around. It was pretty cool - I only wish I could have fit under there myself! All in all, it was great aquarium - I think I liked it even better than the one in Baltimore.

Another stop on our trip was at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. It was pretty cool in there - they had way more skeletons than I would have expected. Among the larger skeletons they had a brontosaurus, a triceratops, and a stegosaurus - but they also had a whole bunch of raptor-sized skeletons too (think Jurassic Park). Among the mammal skeletons they had a prehistoric elk with antlers nine feet across! The plaque said the antlers weighed more than the rest of the skeleton combined! They didn't allow any photos inside the museum, but we got this one from the outside.

The first stop on Sean's road trip was the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island. We didn't take many pictures, but that's only because we were having such a good time. But we did get one cute pic of this red panda lounging about. Looks like a pretty good thing he's got going on there.

Our last stop along the road trip was for ice cream at Kimball's. But when we got there it was too early for ice cream and we had to kill some time. So we played a round of mini-golf to pass the time. We found out that we both are really, really terrible at it! Heh.

One stop along our road trip was at the Museum of Science and Technology in Syracuse, NY. We got there early and had to kill some time, so we walked around downtown Syracuse for a while. Unfortunately we don't really have any pictures from inside the museum - we were having too much fun to remember to take any pictures!

Another stop we made was at Boldt Castle, which is situated on Heart Island in the middle of the St. Laurence River. It's in the process of being restored, but you can wander the entire castle - even the sections that have yet to be restored at all. We had to take a boat shuttle out to the castle, which Carter thought was pretty cool.

The inside of the castle was pretty cool. A lot of the plaster work has been repaired and the stained glass dome was impressive. And in addition to the main castle you can also walk around the boat house, the dove-cote, and the children's "playhouse" (which was a tower of its own, completed with a two-lane bowling alley in the basement).

During a hike at Robert Moses State Park - right on the Canadian border - we startled a raccoon while walking through the woods. It shimmied up a tree and stared at us for as long as we were within view. It was Carter's first time seeing a raccoon in the wild, and she thought he was pretty cute. The trail was super-muddy, unfortunately. But there was no one else there. The trail ran right along the St. Laurence River, and right across the river was Canada. Of course, it didn't look any different than our side of the river. I think Carter expected it to look obviously different.