Last year Chad received a wonderful christmas gift from his sister and her family. She gave him a membership to the National Parks for a year! For those of you who know Chad well, that was a perfect gift. It gets him one step closer to his dream job, that of being a National Park Ranger.
Shortly after opening his gift, Chad asked me which national park we should go to. I quickly responded, Acadia National Park in Maine (I've always wanted to go there). The other option we considered was Yellowstone National Park, but we ultimately decided to go to Maine. The plan was to go this past summer. After some research we decided to put off our trip until September - Labor Day weekend. We felt this would be a great time to go because most kids would be back in school and we might be able to catch some of the fall colors.
I was a bit nervous to go while school was in session, mainly because of Tanner. I knew the younger boys would be able to get all of their make-up work done quickly, but with Tanner being in all honors this year I knew it would be tough for him. We were gone for ten days, six of which were school days. Luckily, all of the teachers were good about giving us the homework/classwork the boys would miss. Another plus was that we were in the car for at least 22 hours on the way there and on the way back, so the boys were able to get all of their work done. I wouldn't say it was the highlight of the trip for the boys, but it sure made for happier boys when they started back to school.
Since the car trip would be so long, we decided to stop in Boston for two days. Chad has had some business trips to Boston lately, so we thought it would be fun to show the boys were Chad has been going. When we were planning the trip we also tried to fit in a trip to New York City (Chad has also been traveling there a lot), but in the end we decided we didn't have enough time to stop there.
We really wanted to the boys to enjoy this trip. Sometime last year Chad and I watched a documentary on the National Parks and became very excited about visiting them one day. Because of the things we learned we were even more excited about visiting Acadia. Taking this into account, Chad came up with a great idea. Before school started Chad told each one of the boys that they had to write a report about one of the places we would be visiting on our trip. The boys were not extremely excited about the assignment, but they learned a lot. Tanner did his report on Maine, Kaden's report was on Boston (The Freedom Trail) and Trevor's report was on the animals of Maine. Devon's report was a little different. He found images of Maine's state seal, state tree, state bird, etc and colored them. These reports proved to be a valuable asset to our trip. The boys found things they wanted to visit and saw thing on our trip they had learned about. I highly recommend this idea!
On Thursday, September 1st, we embarked on our exciting family vacation. The car was packed to the brim, the gas tank was full and spirits were high! Next stop, Boston Massachusetts!
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