We surprised the kids this evening with a trip to Nappanee to get some rocket science ice cream. We figured we should go sometime soon since they were closed last time we went up there.

A win! A win! The softball team got our first and only win of the season today! Nice one, too. We were playing close with the other team (the Rahn's team) all game, going ahead and falling behind, plus I could not seem to throw a strike all game and walked several...to the point that I almost took myself out of the game and put Bob in as pitcher...but I hung on. We finished up the last of the 6th inning with 2 minutes on the clock, if it had run out we wouldn't have played another inning. So, we went in to the last of the 7th trailing by 3. We then put a string of hits together and scored 4 to win in a walk-off run-scoring double! Awesome. That brings our record up to 1-11, good for last place in the regular season standings and a game against the top team first off in the tournament.

It has been a lazy weekend. We took a trip out to Merrillville yesterday, we thought it was for a tour of the Albanese Candy factory, but when we got there we found out that Beth had been a bit misinformed about what the "tour" is. It seems that you can bring in a large group, perhaps like Cub Scouts or something, for a guided tour of the plant (for a fee) or go on a self-guided "tour" for free, which was what we were planning on and found out at the plant that what that means is you can walk past the windows along the back wall of the retail area, which open into the shop floor area, where you can see gummy bears coming out of some machine and heading for a packager. Yeah, that's it...and not all of the windows are even open (they have metal shutters). So the "tour" takes oh maybe 2 minutes and you don't see much. Anyway, we did the "tour" and bought and whole bunch of various candy. Then headed home.
Yesterday we also let Natalie have her first sleepover here. Her friend Haley stayed over, although I'm not entirely sure her parents knew where she was, from some of the things she said. And she ate a whole jar of pickles. And they got cookie dough all over the kitchen. But, we brought her to church with us today.
Tonight the girls and I had an interesting "road trip" of sorts...we could hear mariachi music coming from somewhere, and were trying to figure out where it was coming from. So we went for a walk to see. At first it seemed to just be on Parker Street...then maybe from Owen's...then maybe from Sacred Heart...then maybe from the bowling alley...then maybe from the foundry...then maybe from the old YMCA...and we just kept walking and walking (although Natalie was barefoot, not the best in hindsight) until we found out it was coming from the fairgrounds. So...quite a walk.

Yesterday we all went to the beach! Not Virginia Beach this time, but Indiana Dunes. The same place we tried to go to last year on July 4th but couldn't get in. Well this time we had no trouble getting in. Drove right in to the park, parked right near the beach, no problem. We brought the canopy and lots of sunscreen, good thing since it was hot and it was sunny. And hot. The beach was nice enough, but not as nice as South Haven. We also realized too late that the place the Purvises have told us they like to go is Warren Dunes, not Indiana Dunes, but it's all good. The water was cool, though greener than I'd prefer, and you could see the steel mills a bit closer than I'd prefer, and Chicago was also clearly visible across the water which was pretty cool. We spent the entire day there, The kids climbed the dunes a bit (not overly much, because the sand was awfully hot) and Alex and I went on a short hike around while playing Pokemon Go (it wasn't working terribly well there). Fazoli's on the way home, where we realized how much we had all burned. I guess the sunscreen wasn't as durable as we thought, or maybe it was all propellant (some of it was leftovers from Virginia). We also drove past Deep River Water Park on the way home, we're going to have to try that place out sometime.

We finally got Natalie a bike today! The one we had from the McCoy's was very nice but the shifters just plain did not work, and it needed enough work (I had Trail House take a look at it) that it wasn't work fixing up. It's been in a barn for a while. So anyway, we got her a new one at Wal-Mart (not the best, but she likes it) tonight. She picked out a yellow one that looks kind of retro, perhaps old ladyish, but she's so excited about it.

Fair week...normally we do the Tuesday dollar ride night at the fair, but I had a softball game at 8 tonight, so to make things easier Beth just took the kids during the day. The report I got was that the rides this year did not include many of the rides the kids like, for some reason...no hang-gliding ride...so some of the tickets Beth bought ended up not even being used. And of course it was swelteringly hot and awfully dusty, and nobody even wanted to ride the ferris wheel. So anyway, I didn't need to go there anyway. We ended up not playing the softball game either because of threats of thunderstorms...the summer pop-up kind...there was lightning so the game was cancelled, and all the rides at the fair were closed down too from what I heard. Nobody wants to go back, neither do I. The fair is too expensive anyway.

Just call us Sleepovers R Us...last night we had Missy's friend Teagan sleep over night and go to church with us this morning; tonight Alex is having Timmy sleep overnight.

We are back home. Quite a bit of extra stuff got tacked on to the end of our vacation. Virginia Beach is as beautiful as ever. We made the long drive out there over two days, staying overnight in Roanoke. We picked Roanoke so we could take a drive up the Blue Ridge Parkway for a while on the way there, planning on going from Roanoke to I-64 which is a hundred miles or so, then stopping by Cold Harbor National Cemetery where Beth’s 3x great grandfather is buried. However, we got a later start than we wanted, and we hadn’t realized it would take almost an hour just to get through Roanoke to the entrance of the Parkway, so we had much less time than we planned on and only drove the Parkway for about half that, switched over to the interstate, skipped Cold Harbor, and burned rubber to make it to VB before the leasing office closed. Traffic from Richmond to Tidewater was a long slow parking lot due to construction and a lot of vacationers, but we made it in time to get the keys, while Laura was stopped in traffic a couple hours behind us and mom and dad waited at the Norfolk airport for a couple hours until I could make it there to pick them up.

The whole week at Virginia Beach was great. The house we rented was amazing, plenty of room for everyone (5 bedrooms), pool out back (which I thought we wouldn't use much, but we did...a lot), only a block and a half from the ocean, kayaks and canoes, boogie boards, and gorgeous weather most of the week. Most of the rest of the weekend we spent on the beach, but during the week it rained one day so we hit the mall. We also did the Rudee Inlet dolphin watching boat excursion (in which we saw a lot more dolphins than I expected, and they were closer in to shore than I ever knew), Cape Henry lighthouse, shopping at the oceanfront, ate at Captain George's, had professional family portraits taken on the beach, went down to the outer banks for a wild horse watching tour, and more beach time. The wild horse tour was amazing....so much fun. It was a long drive to Corolla (Beth and I, the kids, and mom) and Beth and I were literally amazed at how much it has been built up since we left the area. We did not even recognize it. So much development. It used to be rich but rural, and there were hardly any buildings out past where the roads ended. The horse tour was in a converted Hummer that held maybe a dozen people, and took us all over the beach and dunes to spot the horses. And we did. Lots of them, including a 16-day-old foal. Amazing. We also were planning on the whole colonial thing, with Jamestown, Yorktown, and Williamsburg, but MAN it takes a long time to drive from Sandbridge (where the house was) to Jamestown. We came up the west side of the James River and crossed on the auto ferry, then went through Jamestown (Beth and I knew that it had built up since we were there. They've done so much excavation and research, and lots more has been built). We went to the glass works, theater, and the whole site, then got lunch, by which time the kids were already restless and some of the group didn't seem in the mood to do any more there. We finished up Jamestown, then Beth and I, the kids, and mom decided to punt on Yorktown and Williamsburg (we even had a reservation at the King's Arms, a real colonial style tavern, for dinner, which we decided to cancel. We then hit Whitley's Peanut store and headed back to the house while Laura and Thomas and dad did Yorktown. As it turned out, Yorktown has built up a lot more now too than we remember from last time (~18 years ago), so they did the whole thing and there was no time for Williamsburg anyway, nor the fancy dinner. If I'd known more about Yorktown, I would've probably wanted to see it. But overall I wished we had just stayed at the beach and skipped all the driving. The drive back was crazy...I-64 was a parking lot. Plus, lots of rain and construction.

Late in the evening on Friday Beth got the call from Marve about Cubby.

We got on the road early Saturday, leaving in what we thought was plenty of time to get mom and dad to the DC airport. Traffic outbound from Tidewater was moving fairly well, but incredibly heavy and pretty slow approaching DC. Normally the trip should take around 4 hours, but between stopping for breakfast on the way out of town and lunch near DC, plus stopping at Cold Harbor, it took us around 6. The national cemetery in Cold Harbor is smaller even than it looks. But we found the grave of John Wilkins, took some photos, and moved on pretty quickly. I would have liked to wander around the area a bit more, but things seemed pretty spread out and we were on a tight schedule. Mom and dad made it to the airport in plenty of time, and we made a beeline for home. It hadn’t even occurred to me until after we left on vacation that I didn’t have to go back to work on Monday, so we did have a free day we could have spent, but we were ready to get home. Beth especially. I was hoping to make it all the way home in one shot, but between stopping somewhere in Maryland to get a turn signal bulb replaced (thank you smartphones) which took maybe an hour overall, and stopping somewhere in Pennsylvania for dinner, we just weren’t going to make it. The GPS put us at home at around 2:30 after we stopped to eat so we just found a place near Pittsburgh. Oh, let me tell you about that place. I’ll start with the full disclosure that I don’t know if this was a hotel problem, or a hotels.com problem. But here's the Trip Advisor review I posted:

We booked this hotel through hotels.com for a same-day stay. One of the things I like about Hotels.com is that you can enter the ages of all the kids that will be staying with you; we have 3, ages 13, 13, and 12. When I booked, the booking clearly stated it was a room for 5 people including 3 teen/tweens, but when we arrived we were informed that the room only had 2 beds, they were not able to offer us a cot or roll-away bed (despite the website saying that one is available for $15) due to fire codes, and they offered us some extra pillows and blankets so one of the kids could make up a bed ON THE FLOOR. Yes, the front desk actually suggested that one of us sleep on the floor of the room that had been booked for 5. When I told them this was unacceptable they offered me an additional room for a discount (costing me another hundred bucks) and a voucher for free breakfast in the morning. At the time I didn't have many other options. I asked to speak to the manager in the morning, but he was unavailable, so I they sent for the restaurant manager; he told me that he would speak to the manager about this. I don't know if he did or not, but nothing was changed on my billing. I would have expected better service from a Doubletree.

Anyway, we got back home on July 3rd, and then turned around and drove away again to spend July 4 at Judy’s cottage on the lake in Michigan with most of the rest of Beth's family, having a cookout/lake day. I really wasn’t in the mood to camp in the driveway so we just headed home again that evening, went to work on Tuesday and then back up to Michigan again in the evening for Cubby's funeral.

I also went back to the doctor on Tuesday, 3 weeks out from the whack on the shin and the swelling wasn’t any less. Still quite a bump. So anyway, the doctor referred me to an orthopedist who I saw later that same day, and who told me that’s quite a lump you’ve got there, ice it, rest it, elevate it, and it’ll go away by itself. Or he could surgically remove the lump if I wanted but I chose not to.