Sunday, April 11, 2010

Arkansas Vacation – Day 4 (Sunday, April 4th)

On Sunday morning, the boys were excited to find Easter baskets downstairs. Most of the eggs were filled with teddy grahams…

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Charlie got a yellow chick pez dispenser and Eli got a bunny pez dispenser.

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I love how every morning the river looked different. The day before started out with fog, but Sunday was a clear, sunny day.

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The kids went on an Easter egg hunt outside and found lots of eggs!

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Charlie liked this big stick just as much as finding eggs :)

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Back inside, Sofia checked out some of her loot:

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So… I debated putting this in chronological order because I didn’t want comments about the boys fishing, but it’s what they did, so here you go. They went out to enjoy and appreciate the beauty around them, and brought home some fish as an added bonus :)

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The big fish is a brown trout and the little one (on the side) is a rainbow trout:

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The boys were excited to see the fish and kept touching them. And no, Ben didn’t pee his pants, he got wet in the river…

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After a dinner of roast with vegetables and flat bread, we ventured out to see the Blanchard Springs Caverns. I took some pictures of the scenery on the way -

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If you are ever in this neck of the woods, I HIGHLY recommend that you stop by and see the caverns. This was the coolest place. We got there at 4:30, and got worried as we drove in and saw a sign saying the last tour leaves at 4:15. I ran in and asked if we could join the tour even though it had already started, and not only did we get to join it, they didn’t charge us either! (Normally the tour is $10/adults). We went on the Dripstone National Recreation trail.

We took an elevator down 200 feet and met up with the group, which included just a few other people. The tour is supposed to last an hour, but we barely made it through the 30 minutes that we were down there because the boys weren’t behaving well.

The park ranger leading the tour was funny (he kept asking us if we could understand him with his thick Arkansas accent since he knew we weren’t locals), but he was also very stern about not touching anything. That’s hard for curious toddlers like Eli and Charlie. And Charlie was SO wiggly, not wanting to be held back or contained.

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Somehow though, we made it to the end (it’s not like you can just leave the tour early) and saw some really spectacular formations inside the cave, which is HUGE – the length of three football fields. There was one column that is 70 ft high. There were stalagmites and stalactites everywhere. At the end of the tour, we all hopped on a bus that drove us back to the visitor’s center.

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After the cavern tour, we drove to the nearby springs -

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Charlie checked out the Harley in the parking lot -

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Arkansas is so pretty!

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This next set of pictures makes me laugh. Eli was making all kinds of crazy faces and Sofia just sat there serenely :)

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Eli was all out of smiles when we tried to take a picture in front of the waterfall -

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The kids had fun throwing rocks, of course -

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After throwing rocks, we headed back to the cabin for ice cream sundaes, and the guys cooked up the trout that they had caught earlier that day.

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