Air Force Academy, Colorado

6/27/09
Wow that was fun! We just came back from horseback riding and loved it! I got a white horse named Voodoo and it was a good horse. Sam had a short little,dwarf mule donkey thing. It was fun and we rode for two hours.

But the really great thing is that my school is done! I am completely done with the school year! I finished yesterday! The first 5 days after I last blogged was strictly school and then we would either watch a movie at night or go swimming or bowling with the Bailey boys. I finished my really big nuclear proliferation project for history and it couldn’t be much better. We’re having fun now that school’s over.

Since yesterday I have gone horseback riding, swimming, and visited Barnes and Nobles, and the Royal Gorge. Yep, I have walked over the highest suspension in the WORLD! I saw one historical movie, 2 gunfights, and three of my brothers dropped from 1,200 ft up in the air to free fall 200 ft. To hear more, go to Will’s Blog. The number of breathtaking sights was infinite. It was a lot of fun!

We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly and came back with 2 more cap guns to add to our collection of souvenirs. We watched wide-eyed as cowboys rode longhorns with saddles and as a tourist threw a tomahawk, badly. Oh yea, we also saw a rare white bison in a pen with other bison as well as rams, mules, big horned sheep, and elk. As I said earlier, we truly did enjoy ourselves and my mother will enjoy nothing more than to upload about half of the pictures she took onto this website. She took about a thousand. That’s all for now; dinner will be ready soon. Bye!

Air Force Academy, Colorado

I am out of cheesy openings so I’ll cut to the chase. Lately we have ventured out of the Academy and to a city-funded park that looked like a national park. It was called Garden of the Gods. This park has hundreds of natural sandstone mini-mountains that have gradually been eroded by rain. We could climb most of them but some of them had signs that said DO NOT CLIMB! ROCKS UNSTABLE! But nobody got hurt so we kept on riding our bikes that we brought with us and climbing stable mini-mountains. It was fun and peaceful and beautiful. I noticed while I was there that I really wouldn’t mind living in Colorado Springs. Anyway, we enjoyed our time at the Garden of the Gods and have been doing school for the last couple of days.

The greatest thing that we’ve done has been to go on a five mile camping trip with the Baileys. It was the very same hike that we went on last week to the Stanley Reservoir. I carried one of the heaviest rucksacks and set up two of the tents with Clayton before we went and played, unlike some of the other campers. We set up camp and started a nice blazing fire with enough firewood to keep it going all night. We explored and went on a moonlight walk, and Clayton and I talked about what’s happened since we saw each other last. We spied and shadowed Sam, Ben, and Spencer for hours and laughed silently at the hilarious stories they would tell. Will, Clayton and I had so much fun exploring and claiming parts of the forest for our Realms and Domains while the Rebels would do ridiculously unorganized hit-and run attacks. Let’s just say that the Shadow Empire (us) won.

We definitely had a good time, until Will sprained an ankle jumping from a height that I would never jump from. But I don’t think it was his fault entirely and he wasn’t badly hurt. The next day all of our aches and pains were felt again as we agonizingly hiked down the two and a half mile trail, but it was worth it. Anyway, that was yesterday and now we’re leaving to the library to do more school. Bye!

Colorado Springs, CO

6/15/09
Hello. I’m at the same library as the last time I blogged at the Air Force Academy. We’ve just been doing one day of school after another and taking two days off per week. One of the days when we were here, we went off base to visit my old friend from Alaska. His name is Clayton and we have already seen each other since we have arrived, but this time we went to his house and had a sleepover. We mainly talked and played at the park but we also stayed up watching STEALTH and THE DARK KNIGHT. We had a great time and it felt good to see my best friend again.
Four of the days we just did school and watched a movie when we went back to the R.V. The movies we saw were Speed Racer, Part of I am Legend, Amadeus, The Sting, and Get Smart. The 6th day we were here (yesterday) we went to visit another of our Alaskan friends who moved here after Fort Greely, the Kiraly’s. We played with their 10-year-old son Zack and his much younger brother Amman. We had an early Father’s Day celebration and ate Carrot Cake, my favorite! Anyway that’s about it and I have to go do more school. Bye!

Leavenworth, Kansas and Colorado Springs, Colorado

We went to Kansas and stayed for 4 days. One was a school day at the local library, and one was visiting the house that I first lived in when I was born. One day and one night were spent seeing our old neighbors the Galvins, and the last day was leaving Kansas. The first day isn’t worth mentioning but the second and third are! On the second day I went to the first house that I ever lived in, I never remembered it but my mom has lots of baby pictures of me in the house. It was very small but I didn’t have 3 brothers back then. I thought it was pretty cute. We even met our old neighbors that lived next to us then too. I don’t remember them but they sure remember me!

The third day we did a full school day and were driving over to our Texan friends, the Galvins, when we came to a train crossing just to see the locomotive pull in front of us. So we waited for this 2 mile long train to pass and right as we saw the third to last train car about to pass we heard this awful screeching. The train had put on its brakes and come to a complete stop right before it was about to pass the crossing! We were going to be sooooooo late and waited and waited for it to start moving again. After 20 minutes of waiting we gave up. We phoned the Galvins and went back to try again. This time the train was gone and we got the R.V. and drove back.
We visited our old friends and played with their kids, Olivia and Shelby. We took a tour of the local museum and took a walk to the maximum security prison. We left my birth town, Leavenworth, later the next day and drove to Colorado Springs, Colorado where my dad did more job searching and I did more school and we all did more visiting.

The first day we met our friends, the Bailey’s. We lived on the same Army base for 3 years and their oldest son Clayton and I were best friends. Spencer was three years younger and he played with Will, Ben, and Sam while Clayton and I caught up on the last year. He’s home schooled with Calvert too so we compared essays and lesson manuals and our teachers (parents).

We had a lot of fun, but I had a fall in a game of Cops and Robbers while in pursuit of a cold hard criminal (Ben) and had a large area of my elbow and knee skinned clean off leaving a bloody, dirty, and painful mess. Clayton, my trustee partner of justice caught up with the convict and caught him. He was the very last criminal except for Will who had found refuge about a mile away (way out of bounds) and laid low for about two hours. Anyway I had a lot of fun with the Baileys and will see them later this week.

We went to church at a place where my Dad’s old secretary’s husband preaches, so we went to church there after driving an hour. But they had cake so I’m not complaining. We stayed for the service and stayed a little while longer and visited in the back of the chapel. It was his last sermon so he went out with a bang, a long 2 hour bang (service about change). But we enjoyed it and it was almost as if it was directed directly at us because we are going through change and a time of transition as well. We enjoyed our time there.

Then we drove to a good friend of my dad’s ranch. He disappointingly didn’t have a whole bunch of work that needed to be done, but we did get to dig a flower bed, plant a hundred strawberry pants, bring an extra strawberry plant home (to my great enjoyment), walk horses, ride horses, feed horses, clean horses, and help eat an incredibly messy lunch that was literally poured on the table and eaten without plates or silverware but with our hands (to my brothers great enjoyment). But still I don’t think we got to help out enough.

The next day we did a full day of school and went to our old friends from Alaska, the Bowens. We visited for over 4 hours and played with their daughter, Carmen. We ate a delicious dinner, played monopoly, and wore out their greyhound in the backyard with much chasing, fetching, and unsuccessful racing. That dog is fast and broke over 40 miles an hour easily. We greatly enjoyed our time visiting and now are doing school at a local library on the great U.S. Air Force Academy Base where about 1,000 senior students graduate each year!

Iowa; Liberty, Missouri; Leavenworth, Kansas

6/2/09
We left Chicago after 2 more days of school and w/ all green tests completed; I’m trying a new method of getting everything done in school. Instead of going by lesson I’m going to do things by subject. I’ve already finished science, geography, reading and I’m almost done with history. Anyway, we left Chicago and went to a campground called Country Campgrounds in Iowa and went ice skating at a nearby ice rink.

The next day we continued to Liberty, Missouri where we stayed in a friend of my dad’s driveway. We stayed at the Conge’s (That’s their last name) house for four days and three nights. The first day we pulled in and saw my friend that I played with when I was two or three years old: Christine Conge, age 13. Her brother Mac, age 12, and their mom and dad who said we could call them Mrs. Susan and Mr. Mike were there too. We had fun playing with water balloons outside, and blowing each other up in turns on Halo 3, and playing Werewolf. They were a very nice, kind, outgoing family and we were very thankful and enjoyed being with them. The first night we slept over at their house with Mac and stayed up telling ghost stories. The second night we slept over and stayed up playing video games, and the third night we slept in the R.V. with Mac.

The second day we went to another really nice family’s house. They were the McCloskey family, the parents were Mr. Bryce and Mrs. Michelle, and the kids were Bryce Jr. age 17, and Dylan and Taylor. They’re twins, but fraternal twins. That means that Dylan is a boy and Taylor is a girl. They are both age 12 but are very mature for their age, especially Taylor. We had fun playing in the back yard and watching Taylor with wide-eyes as she’d do all these incredible gymnastics routines. I liked Taylor a lot. We really hit it off, and mainly talked about the R.V. trip, school, and what it’s like to have two or more brothers. We had a good time in short and we all went and watched a good Shakespeare play called “A Mid-Summer Nights Dream”. I wish I could have seen Taylor again, and told her how I really felt about her, but that’s the R.V. life, and the next day I was some 30 miles away in some dumpy campground feeling glum and wishing I was back in Liberty. Bye.