Trip to the East Coast

Last Monday, we came home from a week long vacation in the east coast. We flew into Boston, drove up to New Hampshire and spent the week there. We drove to Vermont a couple times as well.

The first day, we spent the whole day on the plane. Or, most of it.

The second day, we drove up to New Hampshire. It was about a two hour car drive. When we got there, we got a tour of the barn that was a two minutes walk away from our friends house (where we were staying). That night, we all helped make dumplings for dinner.

The third day, I went with one of our friends to the barn for a day. I wasn't able to ride that day, but I did get to help out, take pictures, and watch the other riders do cross country jumps.

 

On horse back, cross country is a long course of jumps which might include logs, ditches, large obstacles to jump over, and water, which your horse has to wade through.

We swam in the pool later that night, and after dinner played games outside.

On the fourth day, I got to ride. I was the only western rider out of the group of girls in the riding camp, the rest rode english.

Here is a picture showing a western saddle and an english saddle. Sorry the english saddle in the picture doesn't have any stirrups!

Usually, only English riders jump, because their saddles are better designed for jumping. I did a few low western jumps on a horse named Jaws. 

That afternoon, we swam in a pond.

On the fifth day I tried out riding English and did a couple more jumps. The stirrups on an English saddle (where you put your feet) were a lot thinner than on a western saddle, and my feet kept sliding out of them. Also, the English saddle doesn't have a horn, so it was weird at first, not having anything to hold onto while I was mounting.

On the sixth day, we watched one of our friends and several of the horse campers do a horse show. We saw them do cross country and jumping. Afterwards, we went mini golfing and swimming at another pond, with several small water falls.

On the seventh day, we had a lazier day of watching Olympics (go America) and filming a video we have wanted to make for a while. 

On the last day, we did a quick trail ride. I got to ride Jaws one last time. He had been a very good boy all week.

   

He's the tallest horse I've ridden. 17 hands!

On our way to the airport, we stocked up on these delicious maple candies you can only buy in New Hampshire. 

Yum!

Our trip in France

This was what we did at the airport with cool brand new suit cases.

I've blogged about our time in England, now I'll blog about our trip in France.

After we took the Chunnel to France, we found our hotel and went out to dinner with our cousins (all of which speak French). At the restaurant, we met a friendly black and white kitty that liked to be petted. 

After our dinner, we took a longer walk home and stopped at an ice cream place. I got a Mango sorbet (Mango in French is spelled Mangue). By the time we got to the hotel, we were all exhausted. I usually take a while to fall asleep, but that night, I instantly fell asleep. 

They next day, we met up with our little cousin's grandparents and walked through a garden, rode on a carousel, got more sorbet, and saw the Eiffel tower. Later that afternoon, we said good-bye to our little cousin's grandparents and rested at the hotel for a while. That evening, we went on a boat and bus tour and saw the Eiffel tower along with a more detailed tour of Paris. We got back to the hotel at 11pm, so again, I easily fell asleep.

We found a smoothie place for breakfast the next day and took another train to the countryside. It was a four hour train ride. When we got there, we got the rental cars, and drove to our rental house. France's countryside was very lush and green looking and smelling. It was also humid. The green humid smell reminded me of Texas

It wasn't very hot outside that night because although it was 10pm, it was sunset. But our house had no air conditioning. I got ready for bed and tried to fall asleep in my sisters's room, one of the five bedrooms (each bedroom had two beds). The covers were very thick in her room, so after an hour of going around the house to find a place to sleep, I found a comfortable bed.

The next morning, we went to a village to explore. The first thing we did was buy a bunch of bread. My cousin bought a stick of butter and some cheese. It was much hotter than the night before outside. So we waded in a nearby creek/river (I'm not sure, some body of water). We tried to catch the little fish that swam in the shallow water, but it didn't work. 

After that, we had lunch in a gardeny restaurant, were we met our third cat in Paris (the second one was a white kitty we saw near our yard, she was nice but shy.) This kitty was mostly black with long hair. During lunch, we had a minor accident with stinging nettle, I won't say who it happened to, but just so you know, honey helps the stings. 

We visited one more village and took a short walk around it. Since it was getting really hot and we were all melting, we left quickly. But not quick enough to avoid learning that a) the only air conditioned building in the village is closed on Tuesdays (it was a Tuesday) b) there was a gift shop with a really cool inflatable dolphin that we bought, and c) that there was a really good ice cream stand with sorbet for the vegans. 

We escaped into the air conditioned cars and drove home to cool of in the pool, but not soon enough to save the cheese and butter from… melting all over the car. 

That day in the pool, we named the dolphin Dorsee. I wanted to call her Dorsal because it seemed like a good dolphin name, but everyone started calling her Dorsee, and the name stuck. Me and my sister became more successful at riding her. I eventually learned how to jump off the edge of the pool and mount in mid air, but our cousin had trouble 'successfully' riding her. Having Dorsee made the pool a lot more fun.

Another cool thing that happened at the pool, was our little cousin learned how to swim by her self with water wings. While her mom was videoing her swim to her dad, Dorsee (because one of my sisters threw her) photo bombed the back ground. In the background, you can probably see a flying dolphin. 

The rest of our trip was similar to the first day. We explored villages and castles and swam in the afternoon. On the second day, we visited a medieval castle and found a rope dangling down from the ceiling. All of the kids and my dad climbed it. I was surprised I could climb it. When I took gymnastics (I was like 6) I was terrible at rope climbing.

Unfortunately, our trip zoomed by, and we had to say good-bye to our cousins. But over our trip, I learned a lot more French than I knew before. I learned about 32 new words and/or phrases in French. 

After the countryside, we visited the Eiffel tower.

We were monkeys even on the Eiffel tower.

Our trip in London

I'm finally home from our two week vacation to Europe. We visited different parts of London, Paris, and the countryside of France. I'm only writing about London today because if I wrote about everything, that would be a very long blog post.

On the first day of our vacation, our flight left at five fifty p.m. We arrived in London at about noon and went to our first hotel. Later that evening, we all went on the London Eye.

This was my favorite of the pictures I took of Big Ben from the London Eye.

 The next day we saw a British history museum. I was surprised and confused for a while because what I was hearing made no sense. Like for instance, it talked about being part of the Roman Empire. That's when I realized that we were in England, not the United States, and England was part of the Roman Empire. Next, we took the Chunnel to France. I'll write about all our adventures in France later.

We nearly missed the train back to England from France. We arrived and got in line to go to the train. But it turned out that we needed to fill out Custom cards. After that, we got in to go through security, but we were running late. Fortunately, two families that would be getting on a later train, let us pass them. The guy who checked our passports worked quickly so we wouldn't be late.

We speed walked to security and threw our luggage on the belt (I think it's called the belt) and went through the metal detector. My sister and I got through first and started pulling the suit cases off the belt. Quickly, the rest of my family got through. My mom, my youngest sister, and I each took a suitcase and my dad and my other sister each took a bag.

We ran to our plat form and got on something kind of like an escalator, but that is flat instead of having stairs. Like those moving floors at the airport, except this one was at a downward angle. My dad and sister ran faster without suit cases, so my mom, my other sister, and I were still on the moving floor when my dad and sister were getting on the train.

When my sister, mom, and I got off the moving floor, the conductor blew his whistle (which I learned meant "The train is starting soon" or something like that). We sprinted to the train and hauled our suit cases up the stairs. By the time we got to our seats, the train had started moving.



We arrived at our hotel in London and dropped our stuff off and explored our room. Then, we walked to the somewhat nearby London museum, where we met up with our friends from across the country. We went into the Egyptian exhibit, saw three dead people not including the mummys, and saw the Rosetta stone.

After seeing some more historical items like sculptures, carvings, and an ancient chess board, we went back to our hotel and played alibi (which is a fun game similar to Mofia but the everyone has to say a short sentence of what they did the night of the murder and the killer has to change their's a little each time). Next, we went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant and on the way there and back, talked about a song we're writing about Mystery Slop.

The next day, we ate breakfast in our friends' room and went to the Buckingham Palace. We saw torture devices, the Queen's crown, and the Bloody tower. We took a boat ride and walked past Big Ben. After taking a quick break in the hotel, we took a train, and then a double decker bus to see behind the scenes of the Harry Potter movies productions.

This was me with one of my favorite Harry Potter characters, Buckbeak the Hippogriff.  We watched a movie here on how the robotic movie characters like Buckbeak were made.

This was probably the most amazing part of the behind the scenes trip. For the Harry Potter movies, the Hogwarts castle was really green screened in the background. The castle itself was really a huge model. Everything was so precise, a lot of work must have gone into it.

After it was over, we said good-bye to our friends (they were leaving at 5 am the next morning and we weren't going to wake up that early) and went to bed.

The next day, before going to our next hotel, we went to the Buckingham palace and saw the guards. The marching band played "Uptown Funk" while we were there. We also visited the Royal stables in the Royal Mews.

A guard at the Buckingham palace

This was the horse parade during the Ceremony at the Buckingham Palace.

The next two days, we went to a nice hotel in a nice area. It had a lot of buildings and food shops. It was a place that a lot of people took the underground from their homes to that area to work. It had a cool bridge over a river pretty much right outside our hotel. That was probably my favorite part of London.

While we were there, we visited the Prime Meridian.

The line below my feet is the Prime Meridian.

Last, we took a cab to the air port because the underground was on strike. We took a twelve hour flight and got home at 5ish pm. We were exhausted and went to bed at 7.


One thing I noticed in all of Europe was that the pigeons were different there too. There was one pigeon with such dark feathers, I thought it was a crow until I looked at it's head. There were brown pigeons (which were probably my favorites) and even normal looking ones with white feathers on their heads like mohawks.

Trip to Europe

We're leaving for Europe this evening for vacation. We will visit England and France.

We arrive in England tonight. We will take the underwater train to France, and then meet our relatives in the countryside. We will stay in a barn. I assume the barn will be updated so there are beds and rooms for people, but I'm hoping there will be animals in the barn too. Unfortunately, it will be REALLY hot in the countryside of France. Really meaning 90+ to 104 degrees. Fortunately, we have a swimming pool at our house/barn. I'm really excited (especially about the pool).

This is the barn we will be staying at. The picture looks very different from what I expected (I thought it would be red).

When we go back to England, we will see family friends and play with them for a day or two (I forgot).

I won't be able to blog from Europe, so there will be no posts for two weeks. But when I get back, I will have LOT to blog about.

Warning! The blog post after this will be really long. It will be two weeks worth of adventures of my first time in another country. There will be a LOT of  writing and pictures. I will try to limit it. After that, I will be blogging about what our kitties did while we were gone and what they're doing when we're back.

Trips during School

In February, we went on a vacation and skied. I didn't blog about it because I don't usually blog during the school year. Before this trip my sisters and I had never skied or even really seen snow. On our first night, we flew in and spent the night at the hotel. But before we went to bed, we played in the snow in the parking lot of the hotel. It was first time we had been allowed to play in snow (we played in the snow at the car rental place, but we weren't allowed to then).

The next day we drove up to mountain we would ski on and went to our rental house. It was freezing when we got out of the car. It was 19 degrees and we weren't wearing snow pants or a scarf. After it warmed up and we got our snow pants, we sledded. For the rest of the week, we took skiing lessons and after lessons, skied with our parents.

Sledding

And skiing. The place we learned to ski didn't give you your poles until you were more advanced.

Another vacation we went on during school was over spring break. We went to visit our grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. We stayed at a relative's house. Their house was a block away from a fun park we played at about once a day. 

We went on a long hike one day in a beautiful forest. 

At the end of the hike was a beach, which we explored and climbed on the rocks.

On another day, we went to a different beach. The only rule our mom made was "Do not go in the water.". 

Obviously we listened