No School Day 10 - Field trip Day 2

No school day 10- Field trip day 2

Camping at Pomme de Ridge horse camp.

PE & Home Ec- Started the day with hauling branches for the campfire and cooking/eating a big camp breakfast. No camping trip is complete without bacon and hotcakes. Scott's favorite part of camping, making camp breakfast!

Almost too warm for hot chocolate but we had it anyway!

Engineering- put Brittney's new camp sink in use from home school day 7. Worked perfectly for hand washing! Great addition to horse camping.

PE- trail ride for many hours! We rode 8 1/2 miles in about 4 hours. Terrain was rocky in lots of areas. Lots of up and down and lots of creek and river crossings. But these trails are the best marked ones we have ever been on! Glad for good trail horses.

Earth Science-When we got to the bottom river area you could tell it had recently been underwater as it was pretty soft with lots of dead fall that looked like it had washed in. Once the trail opened up to the large open meadow it was clear that the entire valley area had been underwater. Look at the photo of the tree line. You can see the water mark on the tree at least 15 feet high! Had a good discussion about flooding and ancient lakes.

Home Ec- made it to the picnic area basically out in the middle of nowhere. Very odd place for a picnic area. It was on the map but it wasn't near anything. Tables were chained to the trees and it was obvious they had recently been underwater too.

Just happened to be there right at the hottest part of the day and since there was no leaves on the trees it was pretty hot with little shade. Brittney was pretty ingenious and used her bandanna for a shade tent.

Right outside the picnic area there was a sign, overlook trail. The kids really wanted to see the overlook, but we hadn't had good success with overlooks on trails in Missouri, usually overgrown. Decided to try it out anyway. Trail was steep to get there and the over look was certainly anticlimactic. Good thing they had a sign that said "Overlook" because there wasn't a grand view anywhere. Too many trees in the way. Going to have to cut down a whole row to get a view now. If you look really closely in the photo you can see a tiny bit of a lake view. Apparently that is supposed to be the overlook. Maybe 20 or 30 years ago, but not now! Certainly not worth the uphill climb and longer trail to get back and certainly not a place we will go again. But we did it once so we can say, been there done that, no going to do it again.

On the way back we got to the sign that said horse camp short cut with an arrow, but it was pointing to the swamp/lake. Still lots of flooding. Perhaps cross-able with a kayak, but not on horses. So we had to take the long way back to camp.

Government- along the trail we could see lots of BLM survey markers on the public land border. Had a good discussion about what survey markers were and why they were here. Also talked about if you were lost and had cell service you could tell them the numbers on the survey marker and would have a better chance of being found.

Made it back to camp and we were all tired. It was a long day of riding and learning.

Now for the worst part of going on a long field trip, cleaning up, packing up and driving home. Kids did teamwork and got the horse corrals cleaned out while Scott and I loaded the trailer. Overall we had a great day, but are all going to be feeling it tomorrow.

Probably going to have to study anatomy to identify all our sore muscles.