We also spent part of a day hiking around Garden of the Gods. What a beautiful park, and best of all, it's free :) ! I learned a valuable lesson there - You see, those rock formations were so tempting, I just had to climb one...
...without climbing gear of course and as I was smiling for the picture, I was inwardly thinking, I'm going to break something. Lesson - going up is much easier than coming down. Let's just say I was not tempted to try it again, besides it's illegal - seriously. And no, I did not know that until afterward. Moving on.....We loved the day we spent at Focus on the Family. When we were planning out our vacation, Andrew thought I was nuts to set aside an entire day for Focus. We got there at 9:30 and left ~5:30 and we could have stayed longer. There are great activities for Adventures in Odyssey lovers - if you have school-age kids and you aren't listening to Odyssey with them - Get
Started! It's an awesome , Christ-focused radio series that you will come to enjoy as much as your kids. Enough for the plug. As soon as we got to Focus, we headed to the Welcome Center and downstairs to the kid area where we went roaming through the different rooms, trying on costumes from different characters and just having fun. Then we headed over to the Administration building. There we got an official tour of the building and heard about Focus' mission to help families. It was neat to see how Focus has changed in the 10 years since Andrew and I were there last. They still work diligently to support families, but now they have a very strong ministry to adopting families and Crisis Pregnancy Centers as well.Before our tour began, we tried to get a hold of Andrew's cousin Rudy Haerr because we knew he worked at Focus and thought it would be fun to see him. After the official tour, not only did we get to say "hi" to Rudy, but he gave us a fantastic "back stage" kind of tour. For you Focus on the Family Broadcast listeners out there, look at the center picture in the collage and you'll see that I'm actually sitting in Dr. Dobson's chair! Too much fun!! Rudy also showed us the room where they make the sound effects for Adventures in Odyssey and gave us a lot of fun insider info about production of the Odyssey and Focus broadcasts and the voices behind our beloved characters. Then we headed back to the Welcome Center to eat at Whit's End - we even tried a
WodFamChocSod - yum :). Our kids went down the huge ABend-a-Go slide at least a dozen times. We found the Wardrobe which led us into a small "Narnia" themed room that our kids thought was really cool and then we headed to the Kyds Radio booth where Timothy, Kayla, Lucas and I got to record our very own Adventure in Odyssey! After we finished the recording we were given a CD of our adventure to listen to in the van, which of course we did as we drove back to our cabin. Right before we left, I had to visit the Bookstore and as I wandered the aisles, I suddenly found myself standing face to face with Dave Stotts! Ok, so it was just a life-size cardboard cut-out of Dave, but pretty cool nonetheless. For those of you who don't love Drive Through History as much as we do, Dave Stotts is the nutty host of the series who, between his historical figures and fast facts, throws in just enough clean junior high humor to keep my boys' complete attention. My boys had to have a picture - and if you look closely at the boys' pic on the right (check out the bunny ears), you'll see evidence that Dave Stotts isn't the only boy stuck in a man's body. :P
Looks like fun! Did you get the WodFamChocSod? :)
ReplyDeleteWe did indeed and it was very good. Kayla, who has suddenly decided she likes vanilla better than chocolate, got a WodFamVanSod :).
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