ParkQuest Vacay Day 1

This week was Jason's birthday!  Happy 36!!  Now we are the same age for a while again.  The girls planned a lot of special things for Daddy, including a party hat.  We fixed him breakfast.  He got to open presents.  And in the evening, we all went to see Guardians of the Galaxy together.  We all REALLY liked this movie.  It has a bit more questionable language in it than I would have like, and I'm just waiting for Lyla to flip me the bird one day, but I thought it was a fun movie.  I will say that we also got rid of six of the roosters from our flock.  (Another chicken farmer came to get them)  So Happy Birthday Jason!  May all your birthdays be filled with good presents, good food, fun movies, and riddance of annoyances!

We also found a Monarch caterpillar near our house and have been watching and feeding "him" for a while.  Then he made the J and started turning into a chrysalis!  He hasn't had what we think is normal caterpillar behavior, so we weren't sure if he was going to make it. But yay!  We'll see how this stage goes!

Saturday we set off on our ParkQuest vacation adventure.  Our first stop was Janes Island State Park on the Eastern Shore.  The park was out of normal canoes, but they fit us with two tandem kayaks and we took off.  This quest was a "scavenger hunt" where you followed a water trail and marked certain wildlife that you either saw in real life, or saw on signs placed along the trail.  We did get lost at one point and had to turn the kayaks around in a tight spot.  The other highlight for me was seeing a blue crab swimming along the surface of the water alongside our kayak.  That made my day!  After marking all our sightings and making it back to the docks, we tallied up points for what we saw, then played a game where you pick an animal out of a bag and compare it with your sightings to see if you got eaten, eat the other animal, or just co-exist.  It was a fun way to explore the food web of the marsh.

There was also a cool observation tower next to the ranger station.

Next we drove over to Pokomoke State Park for another quest.  This one was about survival.  We had to make a shelter out of materials we found.  Luckily, there were some tarps in the woods.  If I'm ever stuck out in the forest in need of shelter, maybe there will be tarps around.  ;)

The second part of the Pokomoke quest was another water scavenger hunt.  This time we had real canoes, so the going was much easier.  The weather was perfect and the river was peaceful.  It got a little windy and the paddling a little harder on the big river because the wind picked up, but I thoroughly enjoyed the boating!