FtF Summer Scavenger Hunt

We have participated in this for the last two summers. If you have followed my posts on Facebook, you know that I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this game. The first year, my kids really weren't into it. They did not enjoy the embarrassing and/or difficult tasks I 'made' them do. So, when I announced this year (2014) that we were playing again, they groaned and said, "Mom, we don't HAVE to play." But I love it, so we played. One interesting thing we did in last year's (2013) hunt was visit Walt Whitman's grave. So, we also visited the historical house he lived in, which was in the same town as the cemetery he is buried in.

For one task, we had to perform a random act of kindness. We chose to sit around in a Burger King until we found someone we'd like to buy lunch for. We chose this couple. He was all about it, accepted, and ordered a nice big lunch for himself. She clearly didn't want to take advantage and ordered just a small lunch for herself and scolded him for being a pig. LOL.

You can see the kids weren't real thrilled in this next task. It wasn't hard or embarrassing. I guess it wasn't exciting enough.

I was very happy to see they enjoyed it this year. We had to locate a dinosaur statue.

We tapped into our creative juices by building a fairy house out of natural materials. We also had to find a model of an architectural marvel so I bought 4 3D puzzles of the White House, Big Ben, the Empire State Building and a castle. they enjoyed building those and learning about them.

We had to find a pay phone in a phone booth and a gas street light. We drove for hours searching for these after researching possible locations online. Both were in Philadelphia but I wasn't sure the street light was working or if it was still gas so we went to a party rental store and used one of theirs..

Since the party rental store was about 2 hours away near Hershey, PA, we went to the Lancaster Airport to learn about hot air balloons and ballooning and take our picture in a balloon basket. We learned a lot about balloons, weather, air currents, and some physics.

While searching for a phone booth, we passed by a bar and grill with lots of old wagons. We had to take a picture in a covered wagon. It was covered alright but we got permission to sit in it and take a picture. They even had a petting zoo out back. Score!

We had to dress up like an explorer and state what they did so we went to the Daniel Boone homestead in PA and learned about him and dressed up in time period clothing in the dress up corner. I bet you didn't know they wore Hello Kitty back then. LOL.

We had to visit a battlefield and this one is in NJ along the Delaware River. It fit in nicely with our homeschool studies of the Civil War and Revolutionary War. Next month we will be visiting Fort Mifflin, which is on the opposite side of the Delaware River, and learn more about how these two forts contributed to local battles in the Revolutionary war.

We also had to visit a National Park, so we went to Valley Forge to continue learning about American history. I learned so much!

Grill something unusual. We grilled pickles. The kids loved them. Me, not so much. =/

We also had to create a human totem pole. We chose to order the kids in the order they were adopted and, for sibling groups, they were seated oldest to youngest starting from the bottom. These are my youngest 8 kids, at the moment. We are expecting ...

We had to find an RV with a Lazy Days dealer tag on it. We drove through 2 different campgrounds and the older boys stalked walked between rows of RVs looking for the tag. When we found one, we asked the owner if we could take our picture under her RV tag being lazy. We met a nice woman and learned all the places she and her husband have been so far.

Embarrassing family photo. No other words necessary ...

The contest ended with a family photo wearing matching outfits. My sweet, funny clan. We had a great time this year. Thank you, Kimberly and Fulltime Families for the fun times and the RV community you've created.

PS. We came in third place in the hunt.