A Summer Weekend at Home

Every summer I try to jam pack as much stuff as I can into our weekends.  I try to plan camping trips, trips to MN to visit family, and cabin weekends with friends and I actually plan weekends at home meaning I make sure to leave at least one weekend a month during the summer where we do travel.  This is mainly due to the fact that John needs time to get some cattle stuff done and sometimes in longer time periods than after work during the week.  This summer though we have more weekends at home than normal which is okay.

A few weekends ago we had a weekend at home.    And it was wonderful!  Friday night I worked from home and John hung out with me on the couch.  We talked about what we wanted to do the next day and things like Adventureland, berry picking, and Big Creek State Park all go thrown out.  We referenced our bucket list to help narrow down what we should do with our wide open weekend.  We went to bed not deciding on anything.  Waking up the next morning I just knew we should go to Big Creek State Park and go biking and hit up the beach.  John had to work for a few hours early in the morning so we woke up and waited for him to get home and then loaded up the truck and took off.

We started off with a six mile bike ride to Polk City for lunch and as we exited off the Neil Smith Bike Trail we came up against a lot of vehicle traffic only to discover that it was Polk City's annual town festival!  

Elsie enjoyed checking out these crazy ducks and enjoyed getting her picture taking with Tinker Bell and Cinderella.  We enjoyed some pizza and beer at the pizza place in town (which was practically empty because everyone was out in the town square enjoying the festivities) and then hit the trail back to the State Park to spend the rest of the time at the beach.  The trail was so much different than the High Trestle Trail.  That one is pretty much flat where this trail was a lot of rolling hills but is was pretty much all through the woods and shaded.  Very pretty.  

After biking we headed back to the beach and let Elsie play for a while.  We lounged on the blanket and just relaxed! It was perfect.  The water was pretty yucky so we chose to not let Elsie swim but we would get some buckets of water for her (it was a good decision not to let her swim because the beach was closed just a few days later for E.Coli and Algae blooms).

However there were quite a few parents who didn't care how gross the water was because there were a lot of kids in the water.  The sand area was really nice though and there was a huge wooden playground.  

This girl could play in the sand all day!

On Sunday we had an equally enjoyable day.  John worked a bit in the morning again and I started the prep work for canning some pickles.  We purchased a 10# box of pickling cucumbers from our CSA to attempt canning for the first time.  

After John got home we headed down to the county fair to see the animals and to grab some lunch.  First stop:  Pony Rides.  She could have done this all day long! 

While waiting in line we ran into Kara, Orson, Little Orson, and Henry.  

She got to hold a bunny which she thought was pretty neat. 

And also got to enjoy a "snowball"- what Elsie's calls a snow cone. 

More Pony Rides

We biked home to get Elsie down for an afternoon nap and then John and I tackled the pickles.  Besides the fact that it can be stressful because you had to do things at certain times or when things got to be a certain temperature we enjoyed it and it was fun to see the jars all lines up.  We did 15 pints in all with three different recipes.  Some zesty dill slices, bread and butter and some dill spears as well.  I can't wait to try them all!

After naptime we got ready and headed to Nick and Hillary's farm for a BBQ and campfire.  Elsie had so much fun playing with Owen.  He drove his little battery operated Gator while she rode behind in the little trailer.  We didnt' get home until after 10:00 pm that night.  As we were getting ready for bed we talked about all the fun things we did over the weekend and I asked her what her favorite thing was.  Her response" Riding around on the tractor with Owen"  :)