3 Full Days with No Kids

I've been kid-free since Sunday morning. It's always odd to not have the kids around. While I relish in my "me" time, I can't help but find myself a bit bored without them around. What in the world did I used to do before I had kids?

Kevin and I went to Blowing Rock after depositing the kids with his parents. Blowing Rock is an interesting little town. The sidewalks roll up around 6pm, odd little tourist town with nothing to do after dark. There's one bar, Six Pence, same place as in Baxter) so we hung out there since they and the ice cream place were literally the only places open after 6pm. Craziness. Cute mountainside town, but I doubt we'll be back. We also checked out Boone, the actual Blowing Rock and Grandfather Mountain. Froze my ass off at Grandfather... a tanktop, skirt and flip-flops were no match for 60 degree temps and 30+ mph winds. I had no idea there was no path to the top and that you had to walk on boulders... we didn't make it much past the swinging bridge because I felt like I was going to blow off the side! We weren't the only ones passing on going to the end though so I didn't feel too chicken. :)

Here we are on the Blowing Rock...



Good thing we had some geocaching to accomplish or we really would have been bored. :) We upped our geocaching totals from 19 to 32! We had several "did not finds" which means we searched like crazy and were unable to find it, or faced with tons of briars and flip-flopped feet we decided to let one go. We had tons of fun though and got to see some mountainside areas that are most definitely off the beaten path. I picked up a geocoin (a coin that is trackable by it's owner so they can watch it travel around) and as soon as I logged it I got an email from it's owner... from New Zealand! Turns out this little coin originated one year ago yesterday and he'd like it back. It started in NZ, made it's way to the US and landed in my hands on it's one year anniversary. Pretty cool. I'm going to mail it back to him and am thinking about sending him a trackable item of my own to watch make it's way back from NZ.

Today Kevin had to go back to work, so it's officially been my day all to myself. I haven't accomplished much, but that's ok. I wanted to hit CVS to score some free shampoo, but I only have my inlaws car and therefore not my keys which means I don't have my CVS card, oh well. I'll have to hit it with the kids this week. And I went to Target to get some sippies to send to a friend in the UK. She loves US Playtex sippies... shoot, I just remembered I meant to get her some Teddy Grahams too, I know her kids love them. But I digress... I tried Panda Express for the first time... fairly tasty. Nothing spectacular, but a decent enough place to eat. Now I'm doing some laundry, fun, fun, and waiting for Kevin to get home so we can go pick up the kids.