A Muz and D Weekend!

Muz and D came up this weekend to see Ben after his big week...they got here Friday night, and stayed at the Best Western in Saranac Lake...


We went over early Saturday morning to meet them for breakfast and to bring stuff over for Ben to have a sleepover...


We opened up a couple more presents and played with Maggie in the hotel room for a while...


Then we all went out for a walk out to Follensby Clear Pond...


Ben and D threw a ball that Maggie found by the Colgate tennis courts for a while once we reached our favorite spot...


Maggie likes tennis balls...


After the walk, we all went to the Wild Center in Tupper Lake...a great natural history museum that is always a super time...


On the way over we had passed a mother deer and 2 fawns eating by the side of the road, so Ben was excited to watch an instructional piece on deer...


Gail and Ben played with a wind and sand erosion simulator that helps people understand the way that these forces of nature affect the Adirondack High Peaks...


We were extra lucky in that there was a great presentation on birds of prey...you can see the huge eagle owl that was the star of the show, and in the background, a hawk that played a supporting role...


The owl, Marley, watched us all, moving and twisting his head to track us the whole time his handler was talking...


His claws were truly impressive, apparently he is capable of hunting prey as big as opossums and raccoons ...

After the Wild Center, we went for lunch at Mountain Mist, a great ice-cream place and eatery by the water of Lake Flower...


Maggie likes ice cream...yes, that is a drip on her nose...but she still manages to concentrate on the job at hand...


Ben wasn't too interested in his ice cream cone, but he was excited to give the cone to the ducks which frequent the lake near the picnic area...


After lunch we went on a walk along the Bloomingdale Bog trail...Ben was a little tired, and had a birthday to go to afterwards, so he took it a little easy...


Maggie likes mud...she went swimming about 20 times during our hour-long walk, including one time when she leapt into some serious mud, and even plunged her nose into it...D had to walk into the water when we found a less muddy spot and splash her off to get her clean...


After the birthday party (which was great...Happy Birthday Ayla!), Muz and D and Ben went in one direction (for pizza and a sleepover at the Best Western) while Gail and I went over to Lake Placid for an anniversary dinner (our 10th was on the 6th) at Desperados, a super Mexican restaurant...after supper we stopped off at Price Chopper for some margarita fixin's for our evening...on the way out, we saw this view of a cloud getting caught on the pointy end of Whiteface Mountain...


The next morning, not too early, I met Muz and D and Ben over at the Paul Smiths VIC, for a walk...the trail we took goes along the marshy water, and out over it at intervals on boardwalks that allow great views of the surrounding area...


Muz and Ben found a cool frog sunning himself right by the boardwalk while D and Maggie moved out in search of more great smells...


After Muz and D left, to go back down to NYC, we went home in the just-started rain to play with a birthday present from Anti-Sarah...a block of "rock" with all sorts of Egyptian treasure encapsulated inside of it, that we got to take apart like archaeologists (the goggles are mine...yes, I'm that nerdy)...


Once we had all of the pieces out of the block, we polished them up a bit using an old toothbrush...{Ben could totally be an ad for this thing!!!}...


As a bonus, there's a cool game included in the box that we played a bunch of times after we found all of the pieces...we each won a game apiece...

Since that time, we've been taking it easy, getting ready for another big week of Kindergarten through some Scooby-Doo therapy...(Old-Man Smithers would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for those meddling kids, and their pesky mutt too)...

A fun and busy weekend for the newly 5 year-old and his parents and grandparents...