Road Schooling - Day 4 - 3/18/20

Hump day was a really good day.  We enjoyed French toast & bacon and sausage for breakfast and the kiddos did some schoolwork until I hooked up the trailer to dump the sewage tanks about a mile away.  The grey water tank was the most full at 3/4 of a tank, but I dumped them both.  After re-parking the trailer we headed off to town to find WiFi for the kiddos lessons.  McD's to the rescue again.  We sat in the parking lot and did that.  Jakob's lesson required a flash player which is not a native Apple IOS app.  But I found a browser called Puffin Pro, and it played the lesson well.  After a few hours in the lot, it was cheeseburger time again. 

We then headed to find the Cape Disappointment Lighthouse and Lewis & Clark interpretive center.  The parking lot is about .2 of a mile down hill from the center and is built on the site of a former coastal defense battery which ceased operations in 1948 after some 60 years of service.  There were three large gun mounts remaining along with ruins of other structures.  We had the kiddos read the interpretive signs and even used a pay binocular to survey the Pacific Ocean. 

It's was then a .6 of a mile hike down and around a hill and the Coast Guard Station and up to the Cape Disappointment lighthouse.  This lighthouse overlooks the mouth of the Columbia River and the two jetties that help prevent the formation of sand bars.  The views here are spectacular.  We also met our camp neighbors up there. They have been coming here since they were kids like I have been doing at Kalaloch.

All totaled we got in around 2 miles of hiking and the kiddos were ready for more.  So, back at camp, we unloaded their bikes and headed for the beach where they rode about 3/4 of a mile south down the hard packed sand by kite flyers, beach walkers, and crows and seagulls.  We made it almost to the North jetty before turning around.  They then rode back to camp.  That whole journey was bit over 2 miles.  Needless to say, they scarfed down Angela's wonderful  ramen spaghetti dinner with green beans.  Just before dinner Jakob and I enjoyed refreshing warm showers at the public shower, and after dinner another course of s'mores were cooked over an open fire.  

We wrapped up the evening playing cards: rummy and Go Fish.  We'll probably do this again tomorrow night.  These are great games to reinforce memory and math skills. They were then in bed before 9 to have some quiet time reading and we were in bed before 10.  

We're down to two days remaining on this road schooling trip.  We may try to do this again next week, but there seems to be some pressure from our leaders for us to hunker down at home to slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus.  In this camp setting we're able to segregate ourselves and minimize our exposures to others while allowing the kiddos some really good non standard learning opportunities along with their more structured lessons.



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