Cincinnati Trip

It seems that whenever I go a long time with posting an entry it is because I have too much to say rather than because I have I nothing to say. I'll try to catch you up.

Last month, we all went to Cincinnati for the Teismann family reunion. We had been looking for an excuse to go to Cincinnati for a while and this was our chance. Helen had also wanted to take the kids to the Children's Museum in Indianapolis so we decided to make that part of the trip as well.

We left early in the morning on Thursday, July 16th. We stopped at the Ballard Nature Center in Altomont, IL to look for a letterbox (I'll talk more about letterboxing in another post). The nature center was really nice. We got to get out of the car and stretch our legs for a bit. We saw birds, various insects, and huge frogs, and we found the letterbox. The visitor center was larger and more interesting than I expected.

Ballard Nature Center

We made it to Indianapolis in the afternoon and went straight to the Children's Museum. It is very large and we had a good time going there. It was definitely too much to see in one day. Here are some pictures that we took. After that, we checked into out hotel. Nothing fancy, just a La Quinta.

Indianapolis Children's Museum

The next day (Saturday) we drove to Cincinnati. We had originally planned to go to the Cincinnati Children's Museum because we thought that they had a reciprocal agreement with the St. Louis Science Center. When we got there we found out that they didn't, but that the Museum of Natural History & Science did. That's where we went. This was also fun. We especially enjoyed the cave exhibit.

Cincinnati Museum of Natural History & Science

After that we went to our hotel, which had an indoor water park. We went there for about an hour before eating and collapsing in our room.

On Sunday we went to the water park in the morning and then off to the family reunion. The family reunion was small but a lot of fun. The kids loved playing with their cousins. After the reunion, we went back to the hotel for another hour in the water park.

On Monday we went to the water park one last time. Then it was off to the Newport Aquarium. The hotel package that we got included four tickets to the aquarium. The Aquarium was very nice but it was not laid out very well for what we wanted. Everything was laid out linearly so that you pretty much had to walk through the whole aquarium. This took about two hours. We would rather have skipped parts of it and only spent an hour there since we still had a six hour drive ahead of us.

We did not get home until after 8 and that was with the help of a time zone change. Luckily for us the kids are used to taking long car trips so there was not too much complaining. Of course the portable DVD player and Nintendo DSi helped as well.

This post is long enough so I'll have to post about my job in the next post.