And on Day 14, We Went Home

No more fish and chips and Cornish pasties and full English breakfasts--somehow we managed to eat McDonald's three meals in a row on the way home.

The McDonald's UK menu is slightly novel, at least...

Anyway, during our trip home most of my brain power was focused not on nutrition, but on this:

Tangent: the Gatwick Airport Facebook page is weirdly really entertaining? They mow the lawns around the runways with sheep!

I have the WORST time with airport security! They always hassle me, it's so ridiculous, but this time I didn't even care if they hassled ME--I just wanted my precious fossils and rocks and bits of sea glass and chunks of chalk to make it safely home with me!

I was a little nervous about this clause, because ALL of my rocks and fossils and chalky bits were exceedingly dirty... as were the clothes I'd been digging them up with:

But nevertheless, I fitted all my rocks and fossils and chalky bits into my carry-on luggage, padded with filthy T-shirts and joggers, and hoped for the best.

And then was immediately stopped by airport security and held for nearly 30 minutes while the Gatwick agent picked up every. Individual. Rock. I thought she was being a bit overdramatic in her examination of most of them--I mean, does nobody at all ever fly home with fossils? The Jurassic Coast is RIGHT THERE!!!--but even I admit that the rock that she actually took into the back to consult with the other security people about, the one approximately the size of three stacked paperback novels and with a tantalizing fossil just peeking out of it, might have been overkill on my part. When she struggled to heft it with one hand, I could sort of see her point about its appropriateness on an airplane where you can't even take thread scissors. I was prepared to give it up without a fuss, but the people in the back room eventually decided that even though it was big and heavy enough to brain someone with, I guess it wasn't technically forbidden, and so off it went with me to New York!

Where I was held up by security for nearly an hour, this time, for the exact same examination of all my rocks and fossils. The bad news is that there was only one inspector, and she took her sweet time on each of the massive pile of bags lined up for her to inspect, while all of us travelers shifted from foot to foot and checked our phones anxiously in hopes that our connecting flights had been delayed. The good news is that since we were all just standing there, we all got to see everyone's contraband. When the inspector unzipped one old guy's suitcase and revealed a giant water bottle FULL of water inside, I gasped out loud! Water is FORBIDDEN to cross the security line! 

In an airport, one finds one's entertainment where one can. Case in point: the family in the row ahead of us on our London to New York flight played Encanto on the seatback TV for their toddler FOR THE ENTIRE FLIGHT. Whenever the movie's ending would draw near, one parent would rewind it to the beginning and the toddler would go back to bopping along to "The Family Madrigal." It was awesome.

Finally, though, we only had one last leg of our flight left to fly--

--then just one last hour of driving left to drive, during which it turned out that it was equally terrifying to drive on the right side of the road after you'd been driving on the left all week, and back home we were, safe and sound.

A certain ginger gentleman was VERY happy to see us!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!

DIY Borax Crystal Ornaments

 

This is such a fun and easy project that sneaks a bit of STEM into holiday crafting.

A few days ago, Will and I were in the mood to do a quick Christmas craft. We'd just cleaned the house for guests, so I didn't want to drag out a ton of crafting supplies, and we were already busy, so I didn't want to start something time-consuming and fussy.

Our solution: borax crystal ornaments!

The hands-on time commitment for these ornaments is just a few minutes, although be aware that the crystals will need to be left alone to grow for several hours, and preferably overnight. However, if you've got a countertop or table that doesn't get bumped every five minutes like my countertops and tables do, ahem, you can start this project in the morning and then check back in on it throughout the day to marvel at your crystal's growth!

To make your own lovely borax crystal ornaments, you will need:

• borax. I use this sometimes as a laundry booster, so I have it on hand with my cleaning supplies. If you don't already own it, research its cleaning properties and you might find that you'll be happy to have it on hand, too!
• pipe cleaners. I also have these on hand, although now that the kids are not so much kids anymore (sob), I suppose the time is coming that I'll have used up my last pipe cleaner and will have no need to buy more. Okay, that just got real sad...
• popsicle stick and thread. You don't need to use these specific materials, just something that you can tie to the pipe cleaner and something that you can rest on top of the container. 
• container. To avoid having to rinse a crust of borax crystals out of a jar, I cut the top off of some of the one-liter flavored sparkling waters that Syd and I are unfortunately obsessed with. Such wasteful packaging! Such delicious water!
• water and spoon.
• measuring cups. You'll need one-cup and a quarter-cup measuring cups.

And here's how to make your borax crystal ornaments!

1. Bend a pipe cleaner into a fun ornament shape. It needs to be small enough that it won't touch the sides or bottom of the container that will hold it, but otherwise you can create any shape that you like. The liter bottles that Will and I used were on the narrow side of the spectrum, so after some trial and error Will eventually hit on a spiral design that fit perfectly with plenty of room to spare AND looks utterly magical when crystalized!

You can crystalize two or three ornaments at once with the borax solution we use, and with Will's design we were able to do two spirals per container.

When you've got a design that you like, tie your thread to it, leaving plenty of length to wrap around the popsicle stick later.

2. Put water to boil, and while you're waiting, measure out 1/4 cup of borax and pour it into the bottom of the container you'll be using to grow your borax crystal ornaments.

When the water boils, measure out two cups and pour it into the container, then stir the borax well to create a saturated solution. The boiling water shrunk our plastic bottles a bit, but fortunately they remained usable.

3. When the solution is still, drop the ornament into the container and adjust the depth at which it sits by wrapping the string around the popsicle stick. The ornament shouldn't touch the sides or bottom of the container, and should be fully submerged. You can pour more hot water into the container to submerge the ornament, if needed, because this solution already has WAY more borax than required.

And don't forget that if there's room in your container, you can crystallize multiple ornaments at once!

4. Leave the ornaments alone to crystallize. Over the course of a few hours, they'll go from looking like this--

--to looking like this:

5. After about 24 hours-ish, remove the ornaments and let them air dry on a clean towel.

When they're completely dry, knot the string into a loop and hang them on the tree!

I don't know if these ornaments will last from year to year, but I do plan to store them and see. They're definitely much sturdier than the washing soda crystals that Will and I also tried; those didn't cover the pipe cleaner very well, and they started getting crumbly just a few days later:

Washing soda crystals look interesting through a microscope, but they don't make good ornaments.

If you want to turn this into a whole homeschool unit study (here's the very fun crystals unit study we did a few years ago!), here are some ideas:

• Make those washing soda crystals, and whatever other easy crystal recipes you can find. Compare and contrast!
• Try crystallizing objects other than pipe cleaners. Will and I did this, and we found that shells worked okay and wood worked less okay and was a pain in the butt to make sink. Give a kid enough containers, and I'm sure they could have all kinds of fun scrounging around the house and yard for objects to try!
• Look at the finished crystals through a microscope. My kids LOVED this kid-friendly USB microscope when they were younger. 
• Model crystal shapes. These models are more challenging (click on the broken image to be taken to the pdf model), while these are simpler. Copy them onto pretty cardstock, or draw your own decorations, and they'd also make lovely ornaments!
• Read about crystals. These are some of the books about crystals that my kids enjoyed when they were younger:

If you need to sneak in a media component to get your kids interested, Frozen and The Dark Crystal have fun crystal references, although The Dark Crystal will also scare the snot out of your younger kids. 

Because My Life Doesn't Have Enough Noise: Rock Tumbling in Progress

 Originally, I just wanted to tumble some of the rocks that the kids and I collected on our Michigan adventure this summer. 

But then when I found the rock tumbler in the garage, I also found a neat little pile of rocks that I set next to it to tumble in some other, long-ago life. 

When did I do such a thing? What distracted me from finishing? 

Honestly, it could have been anytime in the past seven years, and anything from a global pandemic down to a cute cat walking up and asking for pets could have distracted me. Literally yesterday, while digging through my fabric bin searching for Halloween prints, I came across the flat sheet I bought to make bedroom curtains as a pandemic project. I had sewed the curtains for the bigger window, and then a squirrel ran by or I got hungry for a snack or something and I completely forgot about sewing the curtain for the smaller window... EVEN THOUGH I ALREADY HAD ALL THE MATERIALS!!!

So after I found the Halloween prints I was looking for, I sat down and finished sewing the sheet to the blackout fabric. It took maybe ten minutes, and that includes setting up the sewing machine and threading a bobbin. 

Now that that's done, back to rock tumbling!

Here, then, is the combination of Michigan rocks and previously collected rocks that I added to the tumbler barrel:

I added coarse grit and some plastic pellets, then set up the world's noisiest rock tumbler out in the garage:

Just... don't even try rock tumbling if you don't have a garage or basement or someplace VERY far away from the rest of humanity. It. Is. So. NOISY!!!

Here are my nice little rocks two weeks later!

And here they are rinsed off:

They look shinier than they are because they're still wet, but still, I'm very pleased with how much nicer they are already:

I had trouble getting all the grit rinsed out of every rocky little nook, so I put them back in the tumbler with a couple of squirts of dishwashing liquid and some more water--

I'll rinse them again tomorrow and start them with medium grit.

Now I should probably go do that Halloween sewing project before a kitten walks by and I'm distracted until next Halloween...

Labor Day Weekend in Chattanooga: We Went to Ruby Falls

 

There were SO many caves that I'd wanted to see in Kentucky and Tennessee, but the timing didn't work out for most of them. In particular, my much-longed-for Crystal Cave tour doesn't actually exist, alas, although I have hiked to the Floyd Collins Homestead, at least. Dunbar Cave, where I REALLY wanted to see Mississippian indigenous peoples' cave art, moved their tours to just weekends the very week we visited, argh. 

But Ruby Falls, inside Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, was perfect for a late-evening tour after a long day playing pinball. I mean, why NOT go see a cave at night? It's going to be dark in there anyway!

The tour guide's explanation of how Ruby Falls was discovered was a little hard to follow (later, Matt and I were all, "The guy was excavating for a railroad, right?"), but this little podcast episode is short and precise:

And now I really want to see the original Lookout Mountain Cave! It's bonkers that it's completely inaccessible.

This cave tour wasn't the most educational I've ever been on, but it WAS super accessible, and our tour group had a wide range of ages represented. The tour guide was more fun and bantering than I, personally, prefer (I prefer a tour guide who recites a lot of facts and then lets me ask them a lot of questions and answers me with a lot more facts), but everyone else seemed to enjoy it, so I'm pretty sure the same type of self-reflection is required as when you find yourself continually surrounded by assholes.

(It's you. You're the asshole.)

We had a pretty large group walking down these long and narrow cave passages, and so to my horror, the tour guide introduced a call-and-response for the last people in the group, who THANK GAWD were not me and Matt, but a young couple just behind us. Every now and then, he would call out, "Tick, tick!" and the couple had to then respond, "BOOM!!!" To their credit, they all seemed really into it. It just made me not want to exist in this particular universe, is all.

HOWEVER, the cave passages WERE all rather long and winding, and various parts of the group would often pause to take photos or admire something, which would get parts of the group backed up, and then someone else would also want a photo so then those parts would get backed up further, etc. It was all well and good when it was a single passage, but at one point I came upon two identical cave passages in front of me, one straight ahead, one curved to the left. 

Which way had the rest of the group gone? Hmm, no way to tell. 

Should I choose one at random? Probably not, but think what an adventure!

Just then, heard very faintly from far ahead, came a distant "Tick, tick!" We still couldn't tell which passage it had come from, so the couple withheld their boom until the tour guide came back and fetched us.

The next time there was dilly-dallying, another visitor in our group was stationed at a confusing junction to wave us the correct way...

I really liked the informational signage that accompanied some of the cave formations, so we'd know what we were looking at--

--or just to tell us the names of the most famous formations:

The mood lighting was maybe a little cheezy, but I liked it, too:

It was a fun change of pace from the typical yellow lighting inside a tour cave.

Our tour was essentially an out-and-back trek to the titular waterfall:

Again, there was a little bit of a cheeze factor with a prerecorded light and sound show, but I thought we had plenty of time to gaze in admiration at the waterfall and discuss amongst ourselves its formation and the watershed that flows into it.

By the time our cave tour ended, everything else on-site was closed, but we could still walk up the stairs to see the original castle-like tower that Leo Lambert had built from the rocks he excavated while improving the cave entrance:

It must be an incredible view on a clear day, but it was beautiful even on this overcast night.

There is still SO much that I wanted to do in Chattanooga that we didn't have time for! I want to revisit the national park sites, ride the incline railway, stay in the Chattanooga Choo-Choo hotel, kayak to that island in the Tennessee River, and visit the bakery that I'd promised to bring Syd treats home from but it turned out to be closed on Labor Day, oops.

Next time!

When in Michigan, You Must Search for Petoskey Stones

 

But first, doughnuts!

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The kids and I walked to Mackinaw Bakery from our hotel, on the way playing the very important game of Whose Beautiful Beach House Would Each of Us Settle For/Let's Criticize Million-Dollar Real Estate While We Pretend Like Our Own Actual House Isn't Literal Garbage. Syd's favorite house is apparently worth 1.3 million dollars, while Will's is upwards of $750,000. I can't seem to shake my trash taste, however, because the house I want is only worth $300,000. It had a nice view, though, and I can always pop over to Syd's mansion whenever I feel like an evening of luxury!

Following Google Map's walking directions instead of driving directions must have thrown us off a little, because somehow, loudly chatting away to each other like huge tourists, we all managed to walk into... the back door of the bakery, I guess? We just walked straight into... a room, clearly a restaurant with tables and chairs and people sitting at those tables and chairs and chatting quietly not like huge tourists, but there was no signage, no hostess or waitstaff, no kitchen or counter. Just people. In a room.

I stopped and tried to get my bearings, the kids bumped into my back and peered around me but had no insights to offer, and we essentially just stood there, blinking in confusion and mild distress until somebody took pity on us and called out that the bakery was around the corner. And indeed, there was a doorway at the back of the room, and it did turn out to lead into a lovely, large bakery, with picture windows showing the parking area outside (oops!), and a million delightful doughnuts and breakfast sandwiches and coffee drinks to choose from.

Hallelujah for the apple fritters, the likes of which I have not seen since I lived in Texas 26 years ago! 

Considering the fact that we all dithered over the doughnut selection, and placed an inconveniently large order that included doughnuts and breakfast sandwiches and drinks both hot and cold, and I spilled some of my iced latte on the floor trying to get the straw in, and Will ordered a peach and mango smoothie and the guy at the counter said they were out of peaches so she ordered a mango smoothie but they were out of mangos, too, I'm pretty sure we were posthumously given the Worst Customers of the Day award, but eventually we emerged unscathed through the front doors, walked back to the hotel, and enjoyed one more breakfast with a beautiful view of the Straits of Mackinac.

Through our hotel window, I mean. Ain't nobody eating breakfast outside with a swarm of midges.

 After breakfast, we packed up and hit the M-119 for the scenic drive along the coast and through the Tunnel of Trees to Petoskey.

The kids were unimpressed by the Tunnel of Trees, but trying to impress a teenager is a sucker's game at the best of times.

Syd was also extremely unimpressed by Petoskey, but to be fair, Petoskey held some of her least-favorite things, including a sky full of sun, a beach full of rocks, absolutely no wi-fi, but lots and lots and LOTS of spiders.

Welcome to Spider Beach: Part Two!

Will and I, on the other hand, were in absolute hog heaven at Sunset Park. We immediately settled in and commenced our search for Petoskey stones.

I felt like I'd done plenty of research on how and where to find Petoskey stones. I know that when they're dry, they resemble limestone (which the kids and I are WELL familiar with!). I know that when they're wet, you can see the corral pattern. 

What I did not know, though, was how easily I'd confuse them with Charlevoix stones. The first few Charlevoix stones I found, I could sort of tell that they weren't quite what I was looking for. The more Charlevoix stones we found, though, the more I convinced myself that surely these must be what I wanted, because they were what we kept finding!

Good thing Charlevoix stones are also really cool, because we ended up with dozens of them--

--and, as far as I can tell before we tumble them all, no Petoskey stones. I am SO BUMMED!

But here's the landscape that we were working with:

So challenging! I wet a ton of stones, and spent a lot of time wading, as well, but never found anything other than horn corrals, brachiopods, and Charlevoix stones:

What I'd really have liked would have been to visit several different sites. I've been told that hiking away down the beach helps, too, as the area gets less picked over the further you go from more heavily trafficked areas. Will would have been totally down for spending the entire day rockhounding with me, but Syd had already spent most of her time at Spider Beach: Part Two curled up under her hoodie on the rocks, desperately trying to tune out her urge to murder me in my sleep by listening to her music, only getting up every now and then to shake off the spiders and settle herself again even more miserably. I almost managed to convince myself that she could just wait in the car while Will and I kept rockhounding, but I really do want her to still talk to me when she's all grown up, so sadly, we admitted defeat in our Petoskey stone hunt and drove on to Traverse City.

I didn't really want to stay in Traverse City, but it was the only place within driving distance of Sleeping Bear Dunes that I could find us a place to sleep that was only 200% of my budget for accomodations on that leg of the trip. Ahem. I also don't really ever want to go BACK to Traverse City, if for no other reason than that the traffic was terrible, but somehow the kids and I managed to fight every red light and confusing turn lane and left turn into cross traffic and unannounced street closing to get back and forth to the grocery store (where score, they stocked Traverse City Whiskey Co. American Cherry, so that's Matt's souvenir all sorted!), so that later we could do this:

Our very wee cottage was just steps from the beach, and included all the tools that we needed to cook hot dogs over the fire. 

Roasted hot dogs tasted SO GOOD after three days of peanut butter and jelly!

Extendable roasting sticks is such a smart idea, and I want a set of my own!

I sampled some of Matt's whiskey, Will drank some of the juice I bought us because I was starting to worry about scurvy, and we read the sun down on our beach:

I'm SO glad we had our beach cookout, even though we were all tired, because the next day I walked out with my coffee and book and peanut butter toast, planning a leisurely little brekkie by the water before gearing up for Sleeping Bear... and the beach was absolutely covered with dead alewives.

And that's why we ate frozen pizza for dinner that night and microwaved hot dogs for the next day's breakfast!

Day 1: Presque Isle Lighthouses

Day 2: Mackinac Island