Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Vacation Part 2

We left Lene's house on Wednesday morning and headed East. We stopped in Pittsburgh to see my sister Jess. She fed us a yummy lunch and then we all went to the National Aviary because admission was free (due to it being Earth Day). It was really cool to see all of the birds and the kids enjoyed hanging with Aunt Jessie too.


















































We pulled out of Pitt around 2 or 3pm and heading on our way to our reserved cabin in Gifford Pinchot State Park just below Harrisburg.
Stopping twice we arrived after dark and settled in. The kids loved that they each had a top bunk and i loved the coziness of the cabin. I tried to show the layout below...

I awoke to this at 7:30am the next day! BEAUTIFUL. This is the view from our porch.
Rob and Mal soon joined me. Mal put his new bird watching kit to use.



He saw a bird and so got out his note book to draw it.
He looked through the official bird book and claimed what he saw was a vermilion fly catcher - of course they only live in Mexico so how lucky of us to see such a bird in PA!! ;0)
This little girl appeared at 9am.
We all got around and headed for the chocolate factory - it was great of course.




I just liked this painting of coco beans...


Elise is in to tracing everything these days.
We got back to the cabin around 2pm and decided to take the mile long trail to the parks playground. Rob and I were chatting and when we looked behind us this is what we saw. Too cute! I heard him saying "So Elise. How's your day going?"

The next morning we had to say goodbye to the cabin. Even the kids agreed it was the best part of the trip. (Since it was in the off season on a week day it was only $67 per night for a cabin that sleeps six and has a kitchen and bathroom - if anyone is interested.)

Next post - part 3/Lancaster - the last stop on our vacation.

3 comments:

Sara said...

I just read a great article on that very aviary in Pitt this morning! How cool is that! I am glad you got to visit it. It sounded great from what I read. And the cabin looked so nice from the pictures! What a nice peaceful place.

Christian said...

Yeah, we were all bummed we had made reservations in Lancaster cuz I think we would've just stayed there if we hadn't.

And the Aviary we just sort of found by chance. We were going to meet Jess for lunch at a near by park but it was raining so I googled "things to do with kids in Pittsburgh" and that came up. It looked cool and then i saw that it was free that day too! What luck!

a.susie said...

I am SOooo completely jealous I can't begin to tell you! I so want to run away to a cabin! And I really want to visit an aviary! You got some gorgeous photos of the birds!
I love all the pictures. Your little fam is so beautiful. I love the shot of jess and Elise.
Just great! Thanks for letting us share it vicariously.
Can't wait for Part 3!