July 3, 2005 - Sunday

Our first vacation stop, after a wonderful pancake breakfast at a Crackle Barrel restaurant at which Jeremy ate almost two plate-sized buttermilk pancakes (he might have eaten more, but coincidentally or not stopped after eating the ball of whipped butter on his plate!), of our big trip was in Shartsville, PA, and Roadside America, (that link is to the internet site for Roadside America, if it not longer works this is a local copy of the site as of 2005) the world's largest indoor miniature village. Imagine an entire tennis court-sized room full of an expansive, working miniature display of villages, trains, houses, farms, parks, coal mines, etc. with a walkway around the entire thing. Better yet for the boys, there were several push buttons along the way that made things happen, like engaging trains, making a man chop wood, moving a horse and buggy, lifting a hot air balloon, etc. I'm still not sure what Harry and Jeremy thought of the whole scene, but they were gleefully empowered by all those buttons.

I'd never heard of Roadside America before a week ago when Uncle Rich mentioned it, but when we looked at the map and saw it was pleasantly close to Hershey, PA, the two places seemed like a great couple of short stops before being in the car for a while. The boys mother and I had stopped at Chocalate World several years ago on a trip to Gettysburg and remembered the pleasant tram ride through the chocolate factory and the little presentation about how chocolate is made. It's only about 10-15 minutes long and is free (besides the fact that it dumps you off into the candy store) and a perfect division for the boys before headed down to Washington.

The biggest thrill for the boys though (and me, too) came after we got to Washington (actually, Alexandria, VA) and after a nice dinner out. Greg and Jessica took us to a park along the Potomac River that was literally something like 100 yards from the end of the runway at Washington Reagan National Airport. The planes were coming in for landing *directly* over our heads at a height that I swear you could hit with a (very well thrown) baseball and when we got there Harry was literally tripping over himself as he ran around underneath the planes looking up.


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