I wanted to post our pictures of the trip to Atwood Lake with Rick and Nance. Unfortunately Rog had sprained his ankle and was unable to come. Hopefully we can all get together again soon. We were going to bring Chris but needed Rog to come for that. It was strange to go without Chris.

I’d not driven anywhere that long for a while either - and was proud of myself that I kept up with Nancy the whole way there - the traffic was heavy and I lost her a few times — It was about 2 hours away.

Broke in the digital camera, early Christmas present for us.

Here’s a start:

Going to Erie from Dori H on Vimeo.

And by the way when I said “Open the door” I didn’t mean the car– I can see that would possibly be assumed from my statement

All videos here - and I’m sure this is the site I’ll stick with as they loaded fairly easily (not true at my old photobucket account, not sure why…)

http://www.vimeo.com/user297764

edit - WELL, I can’t figure out why the french fry picture had thrown off my whole blog sidebar (I didn’t even notice until today - lol!) but I just put it under the cut.

I’m also trying to delete that extra “zoo” entry but Wordpress won’t let me. Can’t figure that out either. Ahhhh well. No more time to play….

Hadn’t said hey for while — boy have we been busy. Rog has been collecting restaurant menus in 11 counties for Sunlark, and that has been keeping him extr busy on top of the court research he does for them. We went with him. See above for flickr pics, and more on the trip and a yummy recipe here Read the rest of this entry »

oilcity 025

Originally uploaded by criscollrj.

our road trip

Though I was kinda aggravated that our batteries died right at the end when we went to an awesome park North of Oil City!

Rog started working in PA recently and was near some of the hills we always liked to travel to when we were dating. So we had a nice autumn day today [told that it would be one of the last good ones of the fall] and so we set off for a drive with our family and friend Amber.

After just planning to visit Meadville and eat there and go home, we ended up travelling to Oil City and north of there to the Oil Creek State Park where we had the kids play on the playground and we hiked a bit down a bike trail. Unfortunately THAT was wear my batteries died, but you still see a lot of great pictures I took out the car windows!

We want to go back now - it was so beautiful! So hard to leave the mountains behind, but so nice to know they’re only 2 hours southeast of us!

One thing I’ll never figure out is that to get my photos to show the right way on the slideshow, I need to somehow enter them backwards. Since I’m too lazy to figure that out now - let me just say the first pictures are around the destination, then after that they kind of go to the beginning of the trip, with the earlier ones showing up later on the slideshow. The ones where you see an amusement park is Conneaut Lake Park. We had never seen it, and just wanted to see what it looked like. Little did we know we could drive in that close and take pictures - obviously it was closed! My kids wished it was open though. Apparently they were going to be open tonight from 8-11 for a Haunted House or something, but we weren’t planning on that.

Edit of 10-23 - This has beautiful pictures of the views at Oil Creek State Park.  Since I didn’t have a functioning camera at that time, viewing this web site will give you more of an idea of the beauty and calmness we experienced there…

And here’s one picture from that web site:  We didn’t actually get to see this overlook because we didn’t hike that far, but you can see just how big the hills were and the colors were just about like that as well.  Ahhhh.

and other every day occurrences!  In a life that’s so unique sometimes, it’s kind of liberating to know we have problems like other people’s.

After our oldest son Chris enjoyed quite a bit of a movie downstairs with us (RV - pretty cute!) we were getting ready to go upstairs (he had wanted a shower a few times during the movie and had gone up for his 2nd or 3rd one).  I was going in the laundry room to check on the towel load (it never dries in one cycle) and Rog drew in a deep breath and I said, “What is it?”  He replied that he saw the mouse (the phantom mouse that we’ll see once or twice and never see again so we think it’s gone).  Colleen had already named it Harrison.  We had half-heartedly bought traps last early winter and set them, but then de-activated them when we’d seen nothing of Harrison(s) for weeks and our lovely Spice escaped down into the basement and in her 8th life did NOT get trapped by one (she later did die in the basement in the sump pump though). 

Read the rest of this entry »

Atwood 042

Originally uploaded by criscollrj.

Our one-day trip to Atwood Lake! Click for more pics –