Timberrrrrr (1)

You want a Christmas tree in midwest America?

You get yourself down to the (sustainable) Christmas Tree Farm, of course!

Once there, you get in amongst them and make your choice of pine.....whereupon a big man gives you a big saw....

Housebound

Winter arrived with a thud this week.

17 inches of snow followed by a 12-hour blizzard followed by.....sunshine and blue sky.... albeit accompanied by a wind chill of minus 20

The weatherman told everyone to stay indoors, saying the conditions would induce frostbite within 12 minutes.

Wondering how they calculate that, I got the stopwatch out and told Eva and Louis it was experiment time!

Big Cities...Big Fields

We have been off on our jollies recently. Some urban; some rural.

First, we spent a long weekend in Boston. It's a great city and we walked a lot of it taking advantage of the many kid-friendly activities and the adult-friendly shopping. Checked out Harvard too.

Anth & I even managed to get out on our own to sample the Boston night-life. We had a friend of a friend who's moved to Boston babysit the kids in our hotel room, and we got our glad rags on and headed out. We wondered about leaving our kids in a hotel room with a complete stranger.....then we wondered about it some more....then we got drunk to stop all the wondering. I'll let Anth tell you about her falling over in the posh restaurant.....ruined the illusion of our being posh there and then!

After the bustle of the big city, we headed back west where we slowed the pace right down in the fields of Iowa. As far as I can tell, Iowa is known for three things: Bill Bryson; the place where the first presidential nomination elections are held; and cornfields. Seeing as Bill Bryson lives in Yorkshire and the presidential nominations are two years away, we had ourselves a day in the corn! Of all the corn that is grown in Iowa, only 1-2% is edible. About 20% is used to make ethanol and the rest is used as feed for pigs.

Oh yeah.....pigs. Pigs being the fourth thing to know about Iowa....

Serious About Candy

Halloween is a serious busines here. It's a pumpkin-slicing, candy-collecting, fancy-dress-touting industry that starts in earnest at the beginning of October culminating in a Trick Or Treat fest on the 31st.

So, in preparation, we sliced our pumpkins; we bought our Candy Buckets ready to collect the Hersheys and twinky bars; and then we went costume shopping....

Please be assured that I tried to keep Eva and Louis on the Halloween theme....but failed miserably.

Eva went for the Power Ranger look with the Spiderman Candy Bucket....the girl clearly has a SuperHero complex!

Louis went for the horse look! All I can say about that is it's even funnier in the flesh than it is in photo!

Beware Bats, Witches...and Horses

Sam & Lex

We are hurtling towards the bone-crunching, sense-of-humour-removing, testicle-disappearing Mid-West Winter.

So, it's time to reminisce on the hazy days of what was a visitor-filled summer.

Not long after we said goodbye to Mel, we welcomed Sam & Lex.

Lex was a man on a mission. He wanted the full-on American Experience. Sleep, he said was for losers. He took his mum down the swimming pool slide 426 times in one afternoon! He was even seen chasing Eva's school bus down the road!

Fishing (2)

I should add that Eva caught more fish than anyone else!

Louis was interested in catching the fish but only once they had been dropped into the boat so he could chase them and nearly capsize us!

Fishing (1)

We're just back from holiday - vay-kay-shun to be precise - and we had a great time.

One of the stand-out things about this amazing country is its diversity. You've got the big cities, you've got the mountains, you've got the beaches, you've got the deserts, you've got the state parks and of course you've got Mickey Mouse and all his mates ready to scare the pants off your toddlers.

So, deciding upon a vacation destination is no easy task. We decided to go somewhere we wouldn't even have thought of if we were visiting from the UK - so, no New York, no Florida, no Rocky mountains and no DisneyWorld.

Instead we went to Minnesota. Minnesota is known as the State of 10,000 Lakes. We stayed on one of them - Lake Vermillion. The topography was amazing - there are 365 islands on Lake Vermillion. We stayed in a little log cabin on one of the islands and we were about 30 miles from the Canadian border. There's not an awful lot to do besides boating and fising on the lake and drinking in small-town bars but what's wrong with that?