This week’s Memory isn’t from an earlier post – it’s from something that should’ve been an earlier post! Somehow the days have just slipped by since our wonderful week with granddaughter #2 so before it becomes a distant memory, I thought I’d better get busy with this post!
It’s become a family tradition that the summer a grandchild is 10 they get to spend a week with Grams and Pops. (Now that it’s happened twice, we can call it a tradition, right?) Our first adventure took us to Baltimore,MD, Â Washington, DC, and Lancaster, PA in 2013. Hayley’s Sweet Adventure had an entirely different route!
We started out, right at the close of our wonderful family reunion (when, in all honesty, I just needed a nap), with a baseball game just down the road in Scranton – the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders vs the Columbus Clippers.
The RailRiders won, which was great for the home team, but not so great for the Columbus girl. But it was a great game, regardless. The next morning we took care of a couple of chores and Hayley had her first lesson in packing up and moving down the road.
We were off!
We had a little unexpected delay early in the trip –
but we weren’t about to let it derail our Sweet Adventure. By the end of the day we were settled in at our campground outside of Knoebel’s Amusement Park and ready for the next phase of the adventure.
We’d never been to Knoebels before and all we can say is So.Much.Fun.
From start to finish, we had so much fun that we changed our plans so we could spend a second day in the park – we just notched it back a bit and spent most of that second day at the Crystal Pool.
Man – what a great park! Â I HIGHLY recommend this place for a super fun family outing! But before we knew it, it was time to hit the road again.
This time our destination was Niagara Falls, Ontario!
We had an awesome time in Canada. We spent two days being full fledged tourists at the Falls –
Plus a day in Toronto and a day visiting family in Cobourg, Ontario.
Oh, my – we had a good time!
But all good things must come to an end (and she was getting a little lonesome for Mom and Dad), and we reunited with the fam at a little park on Lake Erie, just across the Ohio border.
Here she is distributing her siblings’ souvenirs. 🙂 She really did miss them!
This little summary in no way begins to capture all of the fun we had with Hayley during that week. As the ‘Far Away’ grandparents (and ones that live in a house with wheels, no less), we often struggle with getting to really connect with our grandkids. This adventure helped us grow more in love with our sweet Hayley! Her enthusiasm for adventure, her friendliness with new cousins and campground friends, her helpfulness around the house, her love for her family – what a beautiful and busy young lady she is growing up to be! How thankful we are to have had this special time with her, and what beautiful memories we will have forever.
If you’d like to see some additional pictures from Hayley’s Sweet Adventure, you can check them out here!