Last week, my friends and I decided that it was time to end our winter home school hibernation and take a field trip. Maybe some of you aren’t familiar with what home school hibernation is. This is the time between January and March when we don’t have any extra curricular activities going on in our lives, so we hunker down at home and work really hard on our school books. We catch up on anything that we might have been behind on and sometimes even get ahead on some subjects.

Anyway, we’d all had enough of the hermit life and we decided to make our first field trip of the spring a really big one. No, I mean REALLY BIG. Like, 620 miles in less than 48 hours big. It was a total blast.

I had done some searching online, and found out that Luray Caverns had a home school week in March. The prices were phenomenal, so we decided to start our trip off there. We met up with our friends at 5:15 on the morning of March 19th, and we packed into two vans and made our way west toward the caverns.

We made one stop for fuel and handing out breakfast along the way, and then our motley crew arrived at Luray at 9:00. There was just enough time for a bathroom break and to pay for our tickets before going on the first tour of the day. I should probably mention that our kid to adult ratio on this trip was 19:4…

The caverns were amazing! Some of the kids had never been in a real cave before, so it was fun to see their reactions to all the different structures down there. My favorite was probably the reflecting pool!

After the caverns, we visited some of the other museums on the property.
The Car & Carriage Caravan Museum, Luray Valley Museum, and Toy Town Junction were all included with our tickets. Toy Town Junction is a museum for vintage toys and I saw a lot of the stuff from my childhood there. Not sure how I felt about that!

We had a picnic lunch and let the kids run around a bit before loading them up for the next leg of our journey. The view was absolutely breath taking with all the mountains surrounding us!

All of us had been studying the Civil War era, so our next two stops would be focusing on events that took place during that time.

Booker T Washington was freed from slavery at the end of the Civil War when he was 9 years old. We visited the Booker T Washington Monument National Park where he was born and worked with his family. After watching a short film about his life we got to tour the farm and go inside a replica of the cabin that Booker and his family lived in. We found out that the ranger that helped us there went to Tuskegee Institute which is the school that Booker founded. That was pretty cool. Our time there ended with a short hike, because we always hike, wherever we go!

By this point, we had really packed a lot into our first day, so we stopped for some dinner and then crashed at our hotel for the night. I may or may not have been in bed by 8:00!

After resting up, we all met for breakfast in the hotel lobby. I don’t think the staff knew what hit them. The waffle maker was on over-load and I think they almost ran out of milk. Despite the breakfast madness, we were packed back up and on the road by 8:30.

In keeping with our Civil War studies, we visited Appomattox Courthouse National Park. This is where Lee surrendered to Grant and the Civil War was officially ended. We spent a great deal of time in the visitor center. The park rangers gave each of the kids a junior park ranger book, and they all worked really hard to find all the information needed to complete the activities inside.

If you’ve never gotten a junior park ranger book which is available at most national parks, you should really try it! It gives the kids a chance to be interactive in their visits and makes learning a lot more fun for them. When they’re done, they get a park ranger badge from that specific park.

We got to piggy back on the tour of another school group that was at the McLean House where the terms of surrender were drawn up. This meant that we got to hear the ranger talk that was given. The rangers did a great job explaining what happened there!

After another picnic lunch, we surprised the kids by taking them to Dairy Queen for a free cone because it was the first day of spring! This has been a tradition for a few years, and we weren’t going to break tradition just because we were on a field trip! Shout out to Appomattox Dairy Queen for handling our crew like champs!

We were really close to Appomattox-Buckingham State Forest, so before heading home, we stopped and took an hour long hike on one of the trails there. As I said before, it’s not a field trip unless we take a hike!

We were about five hours from home at this point, so we set our GPS for the nearest Rita’s Italian Ice and took off towards home. First day of Spring = free Rita’s, so we planned our dinner time around our dessert! Traditions must not be broken! The closest one was 82 miles away in Fredericksburg, which was perfect timing for dinner and a snack before ending our trip.

This was an awesome field trip and an awesome group to hang with. Not everyone can hang with crazy, but this crew definitely can! I am so blessed to have friends like these.