Staycation – Vacation Close To Home – Part 2

In Part 1, I covered Monday through Wednesday of our Staycation. Here I am finally going to cover the last two days of our week of fun, close to home.

On Thursday our family all took a canoe trip for the day. We all went down to Mohican Adventures Canoe & Fun Center. It is about 2 hours from our house. Two friends also came along so we ended up with a total of 16 people. At twelve adults you get a group discount so it ended up costing us only $16 per person.

Linda and I and Sarah shared one canoe. Abby started out in another canoe with two of her older cousins. Later in the trip she joined us in our canoe. Sarah paddled most of the time while Linda sat back and got some sun. Of course this means that I ended up doing most of the rowing. (I am not bitter about it )

It was a warm day so the kids really liked getting out of the canoes and playing in the water. The water was not high so Abby and Sarah could stand up in most locations. You can see us trying to get Sarah back in our canoe here:

Here is Abby with the small paddle she borrowed from another cousin. Unfortunately we could only find one of these small ones. The three youngest all wanted to use it. When we go again we may spend a little more effort finding a few more small paddles.

The canoe trip was a lot of fun! There were a couple of places we stopped where they had rope swings. Several of he kids had a great time swinging out into the water. We took the 7 mile trip which should take about 2 hours. We ended up taking about 3 hours. It was fun and relaxing.

Here is the whole group after we got off the river.

After the canoeing we drove just down road to Mohican State Park and had lunch at a picnic pavilion there. After lunch we took a two mile hike through the woods in the park. We were all pretty worn out, especially the kids, by the end of the day. Then we drove back home.

On Friday, we decided to go down to Mansfield, OH. We have driven through Mansfield many times and we always talked about stopping and looking around some time.

The big thing we wanted to do there was ride the carousel. Mansfield is the home of Richland Carrousel Park which was built in 1991. This make it the first new, hand- carved carousel to be built and operated in the United States since the 1930′s.

I must say it truly is a beautiful carousel. Below is a collage of pictures that Linda put together.
(Click on the image to get a bigger view of it.)

Linda and I rode the first time with the girls and then they rode several more times by themselves. The girls always rode horses. I tried to get them on a panda bear but they would hear none of it. They even had rabbits you could ride, which is what I got on.

After the carousel we went and ate at Ed Pickens’ Cafe on Main. It is a very nice cafe with a lot of open space. The food was good too which is a plus.

After lunch we walked around downtown and window shopped in several of the antique shops. I spent 60 cents on a set of six old magazines. I figured I could sell them on eBay and make a few bucks. This turned into a big fiasco but I wont go into that here.

We found a small candy shop and stopped in and got the girls a treat. Abby had chocolate on a stick and Sarah got a bag of popcorn (she just loves popcorn).

So that was the last of our Staycation. We had a lot of fun and we didn’t have to go far from home or spend a lot of money. One day we will take a trip to Disney World with the children, and some day we will make it to Hawaii, but for now this was a great family vacation!