The Griswolds, we are not...

Ah, the relaxation of vacation...Or, broken down into more verbose terms...the stress and craziness of packing everything up, the uncomfortableness of a long car ride, the stress and craziness of getting settled into your vacation spot, a rush of a few days of grat fun, the stress and craziness of getting everything RE-PACKED, the uncomfortableness of another long car ride, then back to reality.

This year's adventure journey found us going tent camping in Pigeon Forge, TN for a week. The trip went pretty well...we had some stressful moments, like Noah picking this week to begin the typical 2yo tantrums, sleeping (the first couple nights were a bit rough, but by the last 3, I had a good routine down where we waited until 8:30-8:45 for bedtime routine and it went about as clockwork as it does at home. Napping was a different story), the campsite in general...but we had a lot of fun at Dollywood and Splash Country, we did a bit of random exploring which was cool, and the view of the Smoky Mountains was great pretty much EVERYWHERE you went.

I won't get too much into the play-by-play though...this blog entry is going to focus on two or three gripes that came up during the trip...

1. The Natural Bridge - This is, as the name says, a natural archway crated by Cedar Creek which is about 200 feet tall. You see a lot of signs for this coming down I-81, and we decided on the way there, how often are we really going to be here? Let's check this out. Well, after driving about 5 miles, you come to the "Natural Bridge Entrance Building", which is where you can buy your 18 DOLLAR ticket to see the Natural Bridge. Seriously??? In what world can you justify an 18 dollar price to see a natural landmark? I really want to know the justification for what the 18 dollars does, other than simply make money for someone. To make matters even MORE frustrating...so we decide nevermind, let's just head back to the road. As you drive past this big canyon where the bridge is, THEY PUT UP 10 FOOT HIGH FENCES to make sure people who didn't pay can't get a glimpse of this thing. Completely ridiculous! Especially when you read about the bridge, and how it was a sacred site for the Native American Monacan tribe. So, let's celebrate how sacred it was by charging an arm and a leg for someone to see such a thing of beauty.

2. Common decency - I've been to camp sites with a shared bathouse a couple times before, so this isn't new, but it just boils to the surface for me again. We were at this camp 6 days. Literally, every day, I came across at least once a toilet that hadn't been flushed. Really? In what world does it make sense to drop your business and then just walk out saying "That's how I roll!" I mean, HOW HARD is it to turn around once you've finished and hit a damn lever! And the one time both toilets were clean, the urinal had been used as an ashtray. It's just nasty and really gets me wondering the train of thought going through the mind of whoever did that..."Eh, we pay the campsite to clean the bathroom, so they will flush it for me...Too much work for me to do it". It wasn't just the toilets either. Once or twice, I came in to find someone had just left the shower on full blast. Because clean water is this thing that we can just demand whenever we want it, it'll NEVER run out.

I guess those were my only two soapbox things that came up on vacation. To balance out the negative, I have come to really appreciate places that have splash pads. I swear, Noah could've spent 8 hours straight at the splash pads at Splash Country.

Your Forgotten Orioles

Wow, I almost forgot about the big Orioles news that happened this past week. That's not a good sign, Orioles!

So Dave Trembley joins the League of Failed Oriole Managers...so I guess he can join Mike Hargrove, Lee Mazzilli, Sam Perlozzo, and Ray Miller in chomping on a cigar and laughing at the Oriole Front Office who are trying to figure out a way out of 13 seasons of losing baseball. I'd feel bad for him, but honestly, I think even Dave wanted out by the end...

I don't follow the Orioles very closely anymore, but I try to keep tabs and be analytical. So, the big question for EVERYONE is WHAT IS THE #$!#@ PROBLEM? How is it teams like Tampa Bay and Toronto can go through reboots and win within a year or two? I understand that a reboot is supposed to take time, but you are also supposed to IMPROVE! In the past 3 years under MacPhail, we have gotten WORSE EVERY YEAR!

So, what do you change?

The manager - It's a band aid on an amputation. Does anyone really expect Juan Samuel to have more luck than Dave Trembley? Does anyone really think if we kidnapped Joe Torre and made him manage here, we'd suddenly be a winning baseball team? Players make the plays, or in our case, SEVERLY SCREW UP the plays

The GM - AMP is the next one on the hot seat...but he hasn't done a lot wrong. Gonzalez was a bad idea, I'll give you that. Atkins hasn't worked out, but he was supposed to be a low risk, low reward stopgap. Tejada hasn't been bad, all things considered. So then you'd have to go after him for not bringing in top dollar talent. But, the great teams grow their players, not buy them. Even the stupid pinstripes have begun growing arms and bats more than buying them. And we've been stockpiling our minor league prospects. And then, look at our prospects last year...Wieters looked like he was putting it together, Adam Jones was a Gold Glover, Nolan Reimold was crushing the ball before his injury, Bergesen was pitching lights out, Matusz was looking good for a greenhorn...but then this year, they all fell apart.

The Players - See above...plus, we can't keep changing player strategy every 2 years. About 4-5 years ago, we went the route of buying the talent when we grabbed Ponson, Javy Lopez, Miguel Tejada, and Raffy. We traded for Sosa a year later too. That did us NO GOOD.

So what? What can be done? Because I can't figure out a damn thing. We don't even have a consistent problem. It used to be our pitching, but our starting pitching (until 2 weeks ago) was being solid. Our bullpen sucks too, but we've been moving failed starters there, so it should get better? Our hitting sucks, but what move do we take there? Brining in one big bat can't solve this. And we tried getting a ton of prospects, none of them are putting 2 and 2 together in the minors.

So, amidst this time of change for the O's, my hopes are bottoming out. All I can hope is this is just 13 years of bad luck stored up and brought on us all in one season. I remember in Brian Billick's last season with the Ravens, where we lost 9 straight, there was a quote from one of the players..."Last year, every bounce went our way...This year, every bounce is going the other way" That about sums up the Orioles. Anything that can go wrong for them, anything you can imagine, ends up happening. Can you even wrap your ahead around who we'll send to the All-Star Game? In all fairness to the rest of the MLB, we should be barred. No one on this team has played well enough to merit an All-Star nod.

So, best to you Juan Samuel. But don't unpack your stuff in the manager's office. As a matter of fact, for your sake, I would start calling other teams and ask for them to take pity and let you be their bench coach or something.

Port Discovery for a 2 Year Old

With the Curious George exhibit at Port Discovery closing this weekend, we decided to take Noah so he could play around with George and see the museum. Now, I had never been to Port Discovery, but I think Shannon had gone, or had gotten feedback from her mom, saying that she didn't think Noah would get too much out for it, definitley not the $13 admission price worth...But, since George was there, we were going to try it anyway. Even though little man is just 2, I think he gets a lot out of exhibits for 3 and 4 year olds too because...well, he talks like one :-P A lot of 2 year olds we meet are just putting 2 or 3 words together. Noah puts full sentences together! Anecdote to kick this off, they have a VW Bug on the 1st floor for kids to play with. I mean, a FULL SIZE VW Bug. So Noah climbs in to drive the wheel...What's the first thing he does? HE REACHES UP TO BUCKLE THE SEATBELT. I'm dumbfounded...Then, he moves to the radio and says "I'm going to turn on the radio" and starts turning up the volume knob and hitting buttons. Yeah, I think he's a bit of a smart cookie there...

So anyway, we parked, paid, and headed in. First floor has a couple of things, we skipped some stuff in the museum to try to prioritize what Noah would want to see...so from what we did/saw, the first floor has a big soccer court which Noah ran around on for awhile, didn't get much actual soccer in though but he was having fun. We moved onto the "store" exhibit, which was a Royal Farms setup with play food boxes, bottles, and cans, cash register, etc. Also had the VW Bug and gas pump. Thing we skipped in the first floor is "KidWorks". I'd probably say that is the "Crown Jewel" of Port Discovery, as it's a big jungle gym/learning stations which go through ALL 3 floors...like you go in at floor 1, go through the stations climbing upwards, and end up at Floor 3. The ages on that one is 4 and up, and 4-6 is meant to stick to the first floor, so...yeah, we skipped that.

Floor 2 greeted us with a train setup, with a crane type thing to pick up boxes. Noah's takeway from this...sitting on the train and trying to find a steering wheel. So, after finding the engine of the train and letting him get about 5 mins solid of steering a wheel, we headed to the "Sensation Station", which is designed for little ones. Things in this room are a little playset with a slide, climbing stuff, etc...appropriate for infant-4yo, water tubes with bubbles, ball pit, lots of toddler toys. Noah's takeaway from this..."Hey look...a LAWNMOWER". Yes, the toy he plays with all the time at home and daycare is the toy he spent about 10 minutes playing with in that place. You know, you can try to figure out toddlers all you want, but they know what they like...Eventually, I convinced him to try out the ballpit, which he proceeded to get buried in. He loved that a lot too.

Eventually, we pushed on and decided to just head to floor 3. This was supposed to be the big attraction...CURIOUS GEORGE. Now, I watch Curious George the cartoon on PBS with Noah in the mornings. Seeing the characters and things, I expected there would be lots of fun things he'd want to play with and we'd have a solid hour of him playing there. A lot of the exhibits though, went a little over Noah's head. Maybe he just wasn't in the mood, but the ones I can remember:

Shadow Wall - Noah liked this mainly for the spinning wheel for different light colors

Elevator/Mail Box doors (You could open these and see what was there) - Noah liked opening (and slamming shut) the elevator doors

Construction Zone (Big conveyor belt to carry blocks up about 7 feet, then roll down a series of rollers to come back to the ground) - Noah only like the wheel you turn to push the blocks up...And he wanted to DRIVE the wheel, not turn it in one direction only

Playing with Wind - Noah did like this one, you had big blowers which you could use to try to turn windmills and ring windchimes.

Build Your Own Windmill - Tinkertoys you could make a windmill out of and fans to test it, but a lot of tinkertoys were missing

Grocery Store - This would've been fun, you could take plush groceries and sort them, weigh them, etc. But they only had 3 plush groceries...2 watermelons and 1 pear. Guessing most of them were taken or moved or...idk

Make Your Own Pinwheel or Windsock - This place was a mess, it was a station where you could take paper, use scissors/holepunch/other tools, and make a craft project per directions on the station. But it looked like it'd been ravaged already, we just decided to skip it at that point

Stuffed Animals - They had little rabbit/bird houses which had stuffed animals. Also a big tree which had a squirrel's hole. Noah played with those a lot too.

So, all that considered, Noah got some out of the George exhibit, but for some reason I expected there to be more "play" stuff. A lot of the exhibits seemed to be geared a little older (Ding ding ding to Shannon, she was right...Fully admitted), so Noah didn't get interested in them. So, after about 15 mins or so, we moved on...

The thing Noah loved the most was the WATER ROOM. Holy crap, that could've been where we got our money's worth. So, in this water room, there are:

Big Spout Area - This was a raised floor, slatted to let water drain, with a bunch of small spouts sticking out of the floor where water was coming up. You could then take various pipes and build water fountains out of it. Noah just liked spilling the water all on himself (Disclaimer, they did have raincoats and crocs available for borrowing, we just let Noah go to it in his regular clothes). They also have a station with two water guns where you can shoot different music instruments to make different sounds, Noah liked this too.

Water Table - HUGE, about 20-25 foot long table which sloped downwards...Different areas...at the top was a raincloud which kept water flowing into the area. Right after this, you could build channels with little walls. After this, you could either dam up the water, or create a lock (I didn't get to play with...I mean, Noah didn't get to play with this, so we didn't get to see how cool it was.) After this were various toys you could play in the water with. At the end, there was a "1 and under" exhibit which was a shallow crate sitting right above the water. I can only guess you would put your 1 year old in the crate to let them experience the water, seemed weird to me. They also had spray bottles at the end of the table you could use to spray and then squeegie the windows of the Water Room right beside the Water Table.

Big Bubble - The thing we got to play with at the Gettysburg Explore&More museum...only this one was run by the person INSIDE the bubble. Also, you had to bring this one up VERY slowly to get it to work. But, was still fun.

Sink or Float - Whole bunch of items you can toss into an aquarium to see if it sinks of floats, you can then use a lever to lift a sifting pan to retrieve objects. Noah just liked throwing things in water and playing with the lever.

Building a Boat - Legos and a water table where you could try building a boat that floats. Only one boat that I could see, but Noah just wanted to throw Legos in the water anyway

BIG DRYER - Before you leave, they have a heat lamp and a wall of blowers to try to dry some water off you. I like that one.

After about 2 hours there, we knew Noah was hungry, Shannon wasn't feeling well, so we decided to wait for the 1pm "Meet Curious George" event then leave. At 1:05, no one had come yet. Not even a museum employee to say "We're running late". Noah didn't seem to care either way, so we just left.

Overall, my impression of Port Discovery...I think Noah will get a lot out of them in 2-3 years. As smart as he is for his age, some of these exhibits are just not that appealing to him right now. Until then, there's lots of other places which are not as expensive and crowded where we can let him explore and play. But, I will give them that they had a LOT of things to explore there. But, $13 is a pretty good chunk of change, so we'll probably wait a couple of years before taking him back there.