#36 - Wrestling Tournament

Our visit to Craig's family in Akron, Ohio brought the opportunity for another new experience. Our nephew had an all-day wrestling tournament.  Since we miss most of our nephews' sporting events, we were glad to get the chance to watch him. I must be honest that, while I've never been to a wrestling tournament before, I have seen snippets of wrestling, and I strongly suspected it was not "my thing." 

The tournament pretty much confirmed that! It was great to visit with our family and to watch our nephew in action, but overall I'm really happy that my boys have not expressed an interest in wrestling.  Still, it was a learning opportunity for me. I learned the very basics of scoring; the ref wears one red wristband and one green wristband. Each wrestler is assigned one of those two colors, and they wear their colored band around their ankle. As the wrestlers score points, the ref raises the appropriately-banded hand, with his fingers indicating the number of points earned.  I also learned about the wrestling world's equivalent of a bat boy. I had no idea that this vital position existed at all.  A boy around 8 years old carried what looked sort of like a giant Q-tip. It was a wooden pole about two feet long, with a padded end all wrapped up in duct tape.  When the time of the match was running out, he would run up to the mat and stand behind the ref. He would watch the clock, and as soon as the time ran out, he would tap the ref on the back with the padded end. It let the ref know to signal that the match was over (because he was busy watching the wrestlers and not the clock).

Our nephew was 2-2 for the day. We spent about 2 hours at the tournament, while his mom had the "pleasure" of spending over 9 hours there! That would be just be too much wrestling for me.  Next time I'm freezing my butt off at an autumn football game, I'll remind myself that I could be spending 9 hours in a smelly gymnasium watching wrestling all day!

By the way, adventure number 36 means that I'm 90% done with my adventures.  It looks very promising that I will indeed accomplish all 40 in my birthday year.  However, being this close to completing my goal brings mixed emotions. It is actually quite sad to be wrapping up this project.  I've had such a great time, and I hate to see it end.  I have 3 of my remaining 4 activities identified. Time and weather will determine if all 3 can be accomplished in January.  If anyone has any great ideas for the remaining unidentified adventure, send your idea my way!

#35 - Various New Adventures in New York

It's pretty much impossible to spend time in New York City and NOT experience something new.  But, rather than count multiple new experiences, I'm going to lump them all together as one.  We arrived in New York City on December 20th, and we spent three days in the city before heading up towards West Point to have a couple quiet days for Christmas.  Even the quiet days in the country provided a new experience for me (see below). 

Even though I have visited NYC several times in the past, there is never a shortage of new things to see and do in the Big Apple. Here are some of the new experiences I had, along with my impressions:

• Drove past Carlos' Bakery (of The Cake Boss fame): would have LOVED to go in an sample something, but there was a line that stretched down to the next block.  Christmas is their busiest season, and none of us was in the mood to stand in line in freezing cold weather for hours.
• Ground Zero: very emotional. It is hard not to get overcome by emotion as the images and feelings of that fateful day reply in your mind.  I was also struck by the abundance of construction workers who are hard at work on the new buildings. As a military wife, I am often thanked for our family's service. As I looked at all these workers, I felt that they, too, are serving the country. They are literally rebuilding the hopes, confidence and pride of uncounted Americans as they rebuild Ground Zero.I, for one, appreciate their service to this country. 

• St. Patrick's Cathedral: magnificent, extraordinary, stunning! It reminded me of an old European cathedral. I'm such a sucker for stained glass windows, and these were simply amazing.
• New York Public Library: second in magnificence only to Library of Congress in DC. If you haven't seen either of these libraries, get to one at some point in your life.

• Completed a 2,000 piece puzzle: Yes, of course I have done puzzles before. But, a 2,000 piece puzzle?! No way--never even had the desire to try one.  My sister had been given on as a gift a few years back, and she felt that having 8 bodies in the house for several days posed her best shot at ever completing it.  She was right, although it was pure hell.  It became an obsession, especially since we were working with limited time. If this is the only 2,000 piece puzzle I ever do in my life, I will have done one too many!  Still, it was thrilling to finish that beast. 

#34 - National Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson AFB

This post is a few days late, since I haven't been around a computer much on our trip (which has been kind of nice).  Seeing the Air Force museum at Wright Patterson has been on my "to do" list for quite a few years. I've always heard that it is amazing, and we have driven right by the exit for it along I-70 on many of our cross-country trips. However, it seems like we're always passing by at 10:00 p.m. or 5:00 a.m., or we're just too far into our 24 hour trip that we don't care to stop and extend our trip any longer.  I always figured I'd get to see it "one day," so we scheduled "one day" into our road trip this time.  After spending the previous evening in Cincinnati (to see Jungle Jim's), we took the short jaunt up to Dayton on Saturday morning with plans to spend several hours at the museum. I knew our visit wouldn't be nearly long enough to see all the museum had to offer (I had been told you could spend several days there), but at least we would get a feel for what it had to offer. 

The museum did not disappoint!  The picture above shows only one of three hangars. In addition there are outside displays and another hangar which is serviced by bus only.  The hangars are arranged chronologically. I began at the beginning (what a concept!) and learned that the Army was sending up pilots for training pretty much as soon as Wilbur and Orville got off the ground.(Wait, you say, I thought this was the Air Force museum, not the Army museum.  Correct, but remember, the Air Force was originally the Army Air Corps.)  Interestingly, the early thoughts were that aviation would be useful for reconaissance only, and that air combat was just the figment of the over active imaginations of young pilots!  In 1908 the Army (specificall the Signal Corps) paid $30,000 for its first airplane, just like the one seen below.

It quickly became clear that if I were going to actually read about all the displays, that I might make it through World War I before it was time to leave (by the way the U.S. had fewer than 40 planes at the start of WWI while Germany had over 150!), so I largely browsed quickly through the rest of the museum. I learned some cool things like:

• Walt Disney and the Disney illustrators created numerous unit patches for various squadrons during WWII.
• As early as 1931 a vertical take-off and landing aircraft, calld an autogiro, was manufactured.
• B-2 bombers look SO awesome up close!

What an amazing collection!  Craig and I decided that he and I would love to come back on a future visit and spend a couple days taking a closer look.

Our detour to Wright Patterson gave me the opportunity for another first--one I tried to accomplish 20 years ago to the very week, but had to put on hold due to the death of my aunt.  I got to visit Fairborn, Ohio!  Where, you ask?  Good question, and no, there's no reason you should have heard of it.  It was the boyhood home of one of my good friends from USNA, and a bunch of us had a running joke about visiting this redneck town.  I was scheduled to visit him one Christmas break, but I instead traveled to my aunt's funeral in Iowa.  So, every time we passed by the Wright Pat exit on I-70, we also passed by the signs for Fairborn, and I would reminisce about my lost visit.  After wrapping up our morning at the museum, we headed into Fairborn for lunch--a mediocre pizza lunch in a nondescript, small, midwest American town.  Craig and I even picked out the motel we will stay at when we return for our weekend trip to the museum.  Fairborn was exactly as I expected, and I was thrilled!  A two-fer in the new adventures department, and both were awesome!

#33 - Jungle Jim's International Market

You can't go on a cross-country road trip without having some new experiences.  Our family has driven I-70 from Colorado to Pennsylvania many times. Several trips back I saw a flyer for a 6-acre grocery market. 6 acres!!! That's even bigger than the Bass Pro Shop which baffled us. It quickly earned a spot on my "gonna see it one day" list.

However, Jungle Jim's International Market is in the vicinity of Cincinnati. http://www.junglejims.com/ That poses a small problem for our I-70 treks, as Cincinnati is NOT along I-70. And when you're about 18 hours into a 24 hour drive, you usually don't want to take a couple hours to detour just to see a grocery store (even though this isn't "just a grocery store.")..

So, this trip presented the perfect opportunity. Since we were stopping at various sites along our way in order to show our Korean student more of America, I just planned a stop in Cincinnati and a visit to Jungle Jim's.

Think regular grocery store combined with Sam's Club combined with flea market combined with cheap Disney imitation attraction.  That's pretty much Jungle Jim's.  Yes, it is HUGE.  It would really take me the better part of a day to fully explore it.  I knew that our approximate one hour visit would just be the tip of the iceberg, and I simply accepted that I wouldn't be able to experience everything that Jungle Jim's had in stock. So, here's a quick summary of just some of what we saw:

• Kangaroo, alligator and ostrich meat (picture follows below). BTW, Kangaroo meat runs $14 per pound.
• More honey varieties than you could ever imagine, including Key Lime honey and peanut butter honey (picture follows)
• Chocolate covered potato chips (we bought some--picture follows. They weren't that great. There was too much chocolate to really even taste the chip)
• Some kind of Thailand fruit that looked like a blowfish and cost $15!
• Indoor fish farms
• Quisp cereal (people of my age--do you remember that?)
• More types of peppercorns that I even knew existed.
  
  


While it was a quick trip, it was fun.  We ended up dumping over $100 on various oddities and treats (although that DID include gifts for the grandpas).  If I lived in the area I doubt I would do my weekly shopping there. It is simply too overwhelming (although their prices were quite good).  I think we mad the right decision in not detouring from our previous road trips. But, since adventure #34 was also in the vicinity, I am glad we took the time to see Jungle Jim's.

#32 - Cutting Our Own Christmas Tree

When I was a kid, my sister and I always wanted a real Christmas tree. My dad was a master of "stuck in his ways," and he insisted a real Christmas tree was a fire danger. Needless to say, we never got one.  As soon as I was out on my own, you can bet that I had a real Christmas tree. Craig and I got real trees for about the first decade of our marriage. However, after we had trees get peed on by our dog, had a tree fall over in the middle of the night and had many tilting trees tied up with fishing line, the mystique of real trees wore off and we returned to an artificial tree.

Yet, I always felt I had missed out by never having cut down our own tree.  For heaven's sake, we are surrounded by mountains and forests, so it just seemed that cutting down our own tree was what a true Coloradan would do.  Still, every year we had a reason for not doing it--schedule conflicts, bad weather or the "we'll do it next year" excuse.

No more putting it off!  This was the perfect year to add this experience to my treasure trove of life experiences.  Early this morning we piled into the truck and headed into the Pike National Forest in Woodland Park, CO.  We bought our $10 permit and then headed up the windy, mountain road. 

If you have ever seen a "cut your own" Christmas tree, you know they tend to be of the Charlie Brown style. We warned our kids that the tree would not look anything like our full, perfectly proportioned artificial tree.  Several miles into the forest, we pulled off the road, hopped out of the truck and started down a ridge on our quest.  All the way up to Woodland Park we had commented on how it just didn't seem like the Christmas season because we had received so little snow.  Fortunately, there was a trace of snow in the valley we hiked, so the surroundings made it seem more like Christmas tree season. It actually was perfect.  Had the mountains received their typical couple feet of snow by now, our hike would have been much more challenging.

Searching for the right tree is sort of like a scavenger hunt.  At first you think you'll never find what you're looking for.  But, after hiking less than a half mile down into the valley, we ran across several viable options. We all agreed on the same tree. It was over 6 feet tall and quite wide.  We set to sawing it down, and we were pleased at how easily that task was accomplished.    Craig was our hero and carried the tree all the way back up the hill and to the truck.  We tossed it in the back of truck and headed home to decorate it.

We are all pleased with the final result. It is obvious that our tree was not purchased from a tree lot, yet it is full enough that we'll all happy with it.  We all enjoyed our adventure today, and we will certainly consider making it a family tradition. If you've never cut your own, tree, I would highly recommend it!

#31 - Drum Lessons

If there are any "failures" among my 40 new adventures, this would be listed among them. However, I didn't get into this "new adventures" business to beat myself up, so I'm not going to look at it as a failure, rather an adventure for which I just wasn't cut out to succeed.

I LOVE music.  My world would be incomplete without it.  I'm amazed at the power of music and lyrics. They can move us to tears or bring a warmth to our heart and smile to our face. I am constantly in awe of how songwriters never seem to run out of new songs to write. How can that be? How can anyone even write a song in the first place?  The idea of actually creating a song out of nothing is as inconceivable to me as is the idea of deriving the quadratic equation to some of my math students! (OK, to ALL of my math students.) 

Having said all of that, I was blessed with absolutely no musical ability whatsoever. None. Zilch.  My parents had me take guitar lessons as a child for several years, and it was a total waste of their money. I am as tone deaf as Helen Keller.  In my several years of guitar lessons, I was never actually able to tune my own guitar. That task was always left to my instructor.  I simply don't have the musical-ability gene anywhere in my body.

I think that's why drums have always seemed so appealing to me. No tone, no pitch. Just rhythm. I was pretty confident I could handle that.  So, early in my "40 new adventures year", I began taking drum lessons from a very patient, generous co-worker, Ben.  For the first few weeks I was pretty optimistic. Ben taught me a simple pattern, and I found myself playing "air drum" at every stoplight as I drove my daily mom's taxi routine. My goal was simple: I wanted to get good enough at drums to play a single song during the worship portion of our weekly chapel services at school. Ben agreed that it seemed doable. I was even optimistic enough that I purchased a set of drums off Craigslist, as "air drums" just didn't cut it for practice.  That's pretty much when my bubble burst.

Ben said, "Great, I'll come by your house and tune them for you."  WHAT?!?!  Tune my drums?!?!? Are you serious?!?! I wanted to cry. Yep, drums must be tuned. Who knew? Of course, that blow was quickly accompanied by ever-increasingly complex patterns that involved hand-foot coordination of which I simply seemed incapable.  The nail in the coffin came when Ben and I agreed to take June off from lessons, due to some mutual schedule conflicts. He told me to practice and get back in touch with him in July.  Well, those drums simply didn't call out to me AT ALL during summer break.  I truly believe that if someone has a passion for something, you simply can't keep that person away from that passion.  I obviously didn't have a passion for drums. The drum set served two purposes this summer: 1. collect dust, and 2. entertain the 2 year old foster boy who lived with us (who, by the way, had far more natural talent on the drums than I did).  So, when the school year resumed, I confessed to Ben that I was throwing in the towel on the idea of playing a song with the worship band. I told him I was grateful for the lessons and new experience, but that drum-playing simply didn't seem to be my calling. He was quite understanding.

Failure? Maybe. But, at least I DO now know what a hi hat, a crash symbol, and floor tom are. And I have seen what drum music looks like. So, this was not a true failure. I did have a new experience, and I enjoyed it for the most part.  It reaffirmed that music is not an area in which I'm gifted, and that's OK.  By the way, if anyone is in the market for a decent (and recently tuned) set of drums, I know where you can get a good deal on one (seriously)!

#30 - Bass Pro Shop

You are probably saying to yourself, "Really? A trip to a store counts as a new adventure??"  Well, there's some history behind this adventure -- and if you haven't ever been to a Bass Pro Shop, it really IS an adventure. 

The history goes back maybe 5-7 years ago.  My friend who lives in Orlando, extertainment capitol of the USA, bought a timeshare near Branson, MO.  My parents, when they were newly empty-nesters, traveled to Branson several times. They loved the shows and musicians.  It seemed to me the Branson crowd was largely 50+ in years, and I couldn't see what about that would attract my 30-something friend to want to vacation there every year.  When she said one of the reasons they chose Branson was because it was near a Bass Pro Shop and that her husband, an avid fisherman, loved those stores, I thought  "Hmmm, a store that could actually influence the decision to purchase a timeshare?!?!? This must be some store!" I decided right then that sometime I would have to check out one of these stores.

Since then I have driven by many Bass Pro shops as we have criss-crossed the country on various road trips. During our massive "Great American Cox Family Minus One Road Trip" of 2008, when Craig was deployed, our travels took me and the kids past numerous Bass Pro Shops. Each time I would say,  "We should stop and check it out, but we don't really have the time."  In hindsight I'm not sure if we really were that pressed for time, or if I simply wanted to get where we were going.  When you're several hours into a long drive, the idea of delaying the arrival time just isn't appealing.

I decided that one day we would simply have to make the time during a road trip, because we didn't have any Bass Pro Shops anywhere near us in Colorado. Then, almost two years ago, when Josh and I were hanging out in one of his favorite locations - the local emergency room - we somehow got on the topic of Bass Pro Shops.  One of the people stitching Josh up informed me that we had one just up the road in Denver!  Boy, did I feel stupid!  It was just enough off our normal beaten path in the Denver area that I did not know about its existence.  Still, since that epiphany nearly two years ago, I have never taken the time to go check it out.

So, when a completely different new adventure got postponed due to schedule conflicts a couple days ago, I decided that the day wouldn't be a waste, and I would finally go check out this mystical Bass Pro Shop.  The kids and I piled in the van on a beautiful fall day and made the short 1 hour drive to Denver.

Did you check out the picture at the top of this post?  HUGE doesn't do this store justice.  Upon arriving I could only imagine what was inside.  Then we entered. This was not a store. It was a Disney attraction - a small scale theme park - an outdoor adventure under a roof!  Wow!  I don't know where to begin. The sheer size was mind-boggling. It is over 4 acres large!  But more than that, the abundance of more things than you possibly take in was overwhelming.   There were more animals (albeit dead and stuffed) in this store than in all of Pike National Forest.  Trees towered over us.  Mannequin rock climbers scaled the walls around us, There was a huge fish tank sporting all kids of big fish that I'm sure fisherman would love to catch, but whose names I have no idea about because I'm not a fisherman!  There was a shooting range which captured the boys' attention for quite some time (and the pictures of which were lost when my cell phone died).  There was a classroom for various trainings they hold. There were departments ranging from food to housewares to clothing to camping supplies to boats to guns to ice fishing huts to just about anything possibly related to the great outdoors.  There was a sit-down restaurant and a Starbucks. For the season there was a Santa's wonderland. There was simply so much under one roof that the capital required to open one of these stores absolutely blows my mind.  It makes WalMart look like a hole-in-the-wall variety store.

While I'm not one at all to rush the Christmas season, I'm willing to give Bass Pro shops a little slack. It probably takes them a full month to complete their decorations, and they are well underway already. Santa's Wonderland was still in process, but much of the rest of the store was already decorated for Christmas. And, they won bigtime bonus points from me because during our hour spent in the store, they played BOTH Bing Crosby and Burl Ives!  To me it simply isn't Christmas without those two, and my family has learned that they WILL be subjected to hours of Bing and Burl each Christmas, so they barely even put up a protest anymore; they just roll their eyes.

It was a really fun new adventure. The kids, especially the boys, agreed they were glad they decided to come with me.  They're already saying we need to make another trip up there shortly to show dad.  If you are ever driving cross country and see a Bass Pro Shop, make the time to go check it out. Stretch your legs for a half hour or so, and you will definitely be wowed!