Sisters

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Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Post Internship Holiday - Part 2

This is a follow up post from part 1 which you can read here. (Photo's to come in a separate posts)

Saturday Evening

  • We got acquainted with Jeremy and Lilian (J&L) and Shana and got ourselves settled for the night. Again girls did well despite the busyness of our wirlwind trip to DC. 
Sunday 
  • Morning - We attended church with J&L which was quite unlike what we are used to. For Albert, who wears a suit every Sunday, it was an adjustment to wear casual clothes. Thankfully Jeremy had warned him :). We enjoyed meeting different people (a HUGE advantage to travelling) and also met the friends whose house we stayed in Thursday night. 
  • Afternoon - For the afternoon service we decided to head into the CBD of Philidelphia to attend the Tenth Presbyterian Church. We had heard lots about this church and so given the opportunity we took advantage of it. We used a parking building which the church reimbursed. A foreign concept to us to pay to park to go to church. One thing that was different to this worship service was that they had a lady upfront signing the songs, sermon etc. It's was amazing to watch her, what a ministry!
  • Evening - We played games. They are a game playing family, that's my kind of family! We played another version of my favourite game "Ticket to Ride'' and also another game by the same company. It was great to play different games to what I have :). 
Monday
  • Our hosts went with friends to an amusement park and we decided to visit the Amish country while we were so close. 
  • We spend the whole day driving around the Amish towns some of which have interesting names to say the least. It was washing day which almost made me homesick as the Amish hang out their washing to dry. We sampled some local food including, soft pretzels, shoe fly pie (which is not bad at all!), snicker doodle cookies (cinnamon) and bought some locally brewed root beer (it's okay). We also saw some of the craft shops, WOW those quilts are pretty amazing, beyond my pay grade I think! We saw plenty of horse and buggies too of course. 
  • In the afternoon we visited the Mennonite Information Centre which had a real life size tabernacle. We decided to 'splurge' and buy a tour to see it. It was well worth while and while it was hot (difficult to concentrate) it was very informative and interesting. You were not allowed to take photo's inside so I can't share with you any photo's, you'll  just have to trust me on that one! 
  • Evening - we made our way back to Philadelphia and stopped by Valley Forge which is a pretty significant site of Early American history. Unfortunately they were closed and we just saw the carpark :(. We couldn't do it all! 
  • We stopped for dinner at a local mall with the girls having Taco Bell and we trying for the first time Chick-fil-A having heard lots about it. We enjoyed it! 
Tuesday 
  • Lillian had graciously volunteered to show us around the historic sites in Philadelphia and so after getting cheap parking advice we were off. Lillian took the bus and got there earlier than we did, oops! She also got us tickets (they were free but you had to have one) to enter into the Independance Hall. Albert and the girls got their badges while I queued up. What a great way to learn by visiting all the historic sites! Here is an extract from the website:
....where the dream of a free country of independent citizens became fact. Here were written the two documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, on which the foundations of our country rest. Here, from 1790 to 1800, when Philadelphia was the nation's capital, the principle of governance based on the rights of individual citizens was first tested.
  • We also visited the Liberty Bell which is an American Icon. The museum had a lot of detail explaining the history of the bell and the crack in it.
  • After lunch, Lillian took us to United States Mint which is were they make all the USA coins. It is quite a process which is explained in detail and we were able to watch the factory floor from above. When we were there, they were not making any coins. What an interesting place, again no photo's were allowed, fair enough :). After that we went home as it was very hot and I think everyone (at least our family) had seen plenty over the last four days! After we got home we had dinner and packed/sorted for our trip home the next day. 
  • We were planning to drive all the way home on Wednesday as my Mom was coming from NZ the next day. 
  • We had a very lovely time with J&L, thank you so much for having us, it was nice to meet a fellow Kiwi!
Wednesday
  • After getting up very early and packing, hopefully we weren't too noisy, we took off for Lansing, Ill. We had learnt our lesson last time with regard to the consumption of liquids and so the girls were on a strict orders not to drink too much. The only 'hiccup' in our perfect drive was that after charging my ipad mini* the night before, it wasfried. We don't know how or why but it did. So this meant that the girls couldn't listen to any audio books and I couldn't read my books that I had downloaded but we survived and arrived safely in Lansing. Albert and I took turns driving. We would stop only to get petrol which was about 3 stops and it took us 12 hours from door to door! 
Our summer internship was over, what a fantastic summer we had. On a sad note, it was sad to leave the lovely people that we met over summer knowing that we probably wouldn't meet them again this side of heaven. On the positive, my Mom was coming the next day and so plenty of excitement around. 

*As soon as we unloaded we drove the the apple store. The apple store looked at it and decided that they couldn't fix it and promptly gave me a new one for free. Albert (although he is not an apple fan) had backed everything up for me through icloud and  all the store had to do was put my details on the new ipad mini and all was well. Both of us were VERY impressed by apple despite their 'stuff' being more expensive than android. I continue to use my ipad mini daily and have had no further problems. 

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