Daddio: Staycation- Day 3

Before getting into the details of today's Staycation, I want to announce that it is Marney's birthday and she is eight.  She's having a great day, but she decided that, from this day forward, she will only answer to the name "Red."  That is her new nickname.  You better respect it.

Day 3 of the Staycation was "Crazy Park Day!"  We had a bunch of different things we wanted to do at three different parks.  Connor stayed home-- what with the broken leg and all-- and Mason stayed with him because his stomach was hurting when he woke up.  (Uh-huh.)

Our first stop was at Zilker Park in Austin.  But before we went into the main part of the park, we stopped outside the botanical gardens to find a geocache:

This geocache was hidden in one of the most awesome spots we have ever seen:

Just looks like a rock, right?  Think again!

That's a film container cemented right into the bottom of the fake rock!  How awesome is that?  Well, we thought it was pretty cool.  We signed the log and left one of the golden dollars in it. In return, we took a peace-sign bracelet which was pretty cool looking:

Here we are signing the log book:

Next we went looking for two letterboxes at a set of large boulders in the middle of Zilker Park.  We looked high and low for the first one, but it had apparently been washed out of its hiding spot.  It was nowhere to be seen:

The second one was also missing-- we could only find the lid to it.  This gave everyone a sad.

Fortunately, however, when we got to playground area, we found the letterbox that was hidden there, so that made us all feel a bit better:

 

After the letterbox, we bought tickets for the Zilker Zephyr-- the kid's train that runs through Zilker Park.  But we had twenty minutes to wait, so we ate lunch at the "depo."

Before we knew it, it was time for the train.  I was a little scared because I thought I remembered the train going SO fast the last time we rode it, but the kids had no worries:

Finally, we played in the playground area for a long time.  All the kids loved the Old-Timey firetruck:

Next we went back to Marble Falls and went to Second Street Park.  We comically ran around pretending to play baseball, but I quickly discovered that none of them knew how to play it.

We also threw the boomerang (please appreciate the awesome action-pose I have in this picture):

And we also tried to fly kites, but the wind sucked so they didn't really fly well:

Red got really, really sad that her kite didn't stay up:

So I decided to get a little alone time with her to cheer her up.  We decided to be secret-dangerous-log-buddies.  This is where we make everyone leave us alone while we share secrets perched up on the dangerous log.  Here's the log:

Here we are trading secrets (I know it looks like we're sitting on the hill, but we're actually on the middle of the logs):

Ava perched on this stump to try to listen in, but we were wise to her:

Next we went to Johnson Park near our house and played on dangerous spinny things:

Kiki got upset about something and I decided that she and I were going to be secret-weird-shaped-rock buddies.  That cheered her up:

Finally it was time to go home, but Jack said, "No, no, no!"

But we went home anyways.  Now we're packing for our trip to Houston tomorrow, and tonight we're going to play games that Red chose: Apples to Apples and In a Pickle!