Staycation, Part 1, Sciport

Happy 4th of July!!

 GI Joe is on his way to the Air Force base in San Antonio , he has some medboard doctor appts at the hospital there, and wont be back till late on Friday evening.
So it is just the kids and me for the next 3 days.

GI Joe is actually on summer block leave, but because of his medboard status,(GI Joe was wounded during his deployment to Afghanistan and is now being medically discharged , aka medboard, from the Army :(, he is not allowed to go within a certain mileage radius from Fort Polk unless he gets an approval from his case manager because of doctor appts that can pop up at the last minute that he needs to be available for.

Which made it very difficult to plan any sort of "normal" vacation this year that was inside the radius.
But, we still wanted to have some sort of time as a family getting away from military life and enjoying our summer in the process.

So we decided to take mini staycations during the next two weeks. Something that we would all enjoy, but would keep us in the radius and allow us to leave Polk in the morning and be home in time for bed.

Our first stay-cation was to the Sciport in Shreveport, about 130 miles, or a little over 2 hours, from Fort Polk.

 The first part of the drive there is a long winding road in the middle of no where. With nothing but trees and more trees.

trees in front

more trees :)

It takes an hour or so to go down this road before we hit La10, sometimes it flies by other times I want to leave the kids on the side of the road ;)
Which is why we have a dvd player in the van, to help past the time and to save my nerves :)

don't they all look so thrilled

After about 30 min I turned on the dvd player.

Ian 

Gabriel

Sasha still playing on my phone

me and GI Joe ( and yes he is driving;)

Once you hit La10 the speed limit is 75 and so the time and miles just whiz by and you are in Shreveport before you know it.

chicken statue

I forgot to bring diapers and wipes for Ian, so we actually ended up taking a detour to the nearest store to buy some when we saw the chicken. Not sure why it is there ??

Once we finally got to the Sciport , we spent the first hour in the lobby, the kids did not want to leave the piano and there is a Tornado wind machine that they had to do a few times along with some other cool stuff.

playing on the piano

An hour is all GI Joe could handle before he told us all we either move on or we will go home, because he did not drive 2 hours to stay in a lobby. ( got to love his direct approach )

learning how to sail by the stars

trying to land an airplane

getting carried by Daddy

being silly

always time for a nursing "break"

working on a human body part puzzle

and the last stop of the day, the mud

 By the time we were ready to leave all 3 of them were pretty exhausted and it made for a very peaceful ride home.

I would not say this is one of the best sciports I have been to, but it was nice and for the price you can't really beat what they have to offer.

But the important part was that everyone had a great time and we got to spend some family time away from Fort Polk, while enjoying our summer.