Hi KORE Middle!

I hope you enjoyed our first weekend of summer break. I know that by the time school starts again in August I will have forgotten the cool things our family did this summer. So, I came up with this great idea for a summer blog for our class. It will let us share the neat things we are doing this summer and act as a memory book for us.

If you want to contribute to the blog just send me an email at andi.gutteridge@koreacademy.org. You can even send me pictures of the places you visit this summer. If you are sending pictures with family members, make sure to get permission from a parent first.

I will get us started off. :-)

This weekend I visited with all of my aunts and uncles on my mom's side of the family. My mom is #7 out of 10 children. While most of them live near where they grew up in Illinois, my uncle, John, and his wife live in California and my aunt, Sandy, and her husband live in Idaho. Of course, my mom lives in Eastern Kentucky. This is the first time I have seen all of my living aunts and uncles since my grandpa's funeral in 1993. Because our family is scattered all over the US, I was only able to visit with one of my cousins, but it was nice to finally meet her son.

While we were in Illinois, Mr. Gutteridge and I visited a local nature preserve that I visited several times as a child. Forest Glen Preserve (http://www.vccd.org/giforestglen.html) is similar to Raven's Run in Lexington. There are several walking trails. It also has an outdoor lab where botanists study plants. You can also camp, fish, boat, hunt mushrooms, and collect berries. I took Mr. Gutteridge to the observation tower where you can see for several miles. He climbed to the top while I kept my feet firmly planted on the ground.

Also during our visit to Forest Glen, we did a little geocaching. For those that don't know, geocaching is a treasure hunt where people get permission to hide containers in public places and post the location on a special website. Mr. Gutteridge and I use a special phone app to connect to the website and try to find these caches. 

Forest Glen had 9 geocaches, but we lost our cellular signal and could only find one. Mr. Gutteridge took this picture of the container.

The geocaching didn't stop there. We stopped at a rest area between Indianapolis and Louisville and found another one.

In this container, we found two travel bugs. Travel bugs are special tags or coins that people move from one cache to another. The goal is to see how far it will move across the country or around the world. One travel bug's goal was to go to Hong Kong and the other one's was to go west across the US. We took the one travelling the US and plan to drop it on our way to Florida this summer.

The great thing about travel bugs is that once you pick one up, you can follow its progress using the website. Here is the map for the one we picked up today:

It started in Cleveland, OH and made several stops in Ohio and Indiana before we found it. Hopefully, we will be able to add a fun stop to its journey.

I'll add more as we visit different places this summer. I hope you will add to this new blog. I can't wait to see what you are doing with your summer.