Central PA

A few days in Central Pennsylvania…

Shippensburg

Our first stop as we started west was in Shippensburg where we visited with the Rockwells, who are the generous owners of our Home Sweet Pop-up. It was fun to catch up with old friends, followed by a long evening helping our kids settle in to sleep in a new environment. All in all, though, our first night in the camper was pretty smooth. There was still a bit of adjusting to be done on Tuesday to get all the connections to the minivan in good working order, so while Staffan did all the grunt work, the kids and I visited with my friend from college, Lisa, and her daughter. We walked over to the campus where we were students together over 10 years ago (!!) and even though we didn’t see much of campus, I could tell that much had changed. It’s always strange to go back to a place that’s so familiar and yet so different at the same time.

On SU campus by Old Main

Emelie’s first corn on the cob at dinner with the Rockwells

Harrisburg area

Once all the adjustments were made and the minivan and pop-up had made friends, it was time to head north a bit to visit my brother and sister-in-law and see their new-ish house. (New-ish because they bought it over a year ago, but we still hadn’t seen it yet.) I’m not sure we ever did finish getting the tour. It seems we kept getting interrupted by something. 🙂 But we did have a fun dinner roasting hot dogs over an open fire, followed by roasting marshmallows and making s’mores. Emelie’s first s’mores! She started singing this great little song “marshmallows, marshmallows, sticky as me!” that she sang over and over for several days. We were so impressed by what a cute little song she made up, until yesterday in the car when we realized it was a part of a song on a CD. But then we were still impressed because she had only listened to it a couple of times several weeks before, and she had no idea then what a marshmallow was. In case you’re wondering, the line in the song says “sticky and sweet” but after watching her eat those s’mores, I’m thinking “sticky as me” was much more appropriate. The kids went down really easily on this second night in the camper, and we enjoyed a great evening on their back porch, sitting around the fire pit under the stars.

Grilling hot dogs…

…And marshmallows

Mmmmm… S’mores!!

Peter and Uncle Jason playing together

Peter and Emelie helped Aunt Megan water the flowers

relaxing evening by the fire

In the morning, Peter found the dog’s water bowl and had a LOT of fun!

The next day, Wednesday, we drove about 20 minutes to my grandmom’s house and visited with her and one of my uncles. It was nice to have a calm visit with a nice lunch.

Great-grandmom and Peter

Wednesday evening we did some grocery shopping in preparation for our first campground stay at the amusement park Knoebels in Elysburg PA. More on that in my next post!