All the girls liked the sparkly shoes
Checking out gifts from us

A beautiful princess card

We have been very busy doing nothing much, mostly visiting daughter Rachel and family. Friday was Madeliene's 5th birthday. We gave her our gifts then. The top pic is at her birthday party next day admiring pink sparkly shoes with mom Rachel and various cousins. Tuesday and today we actually went sightseeing, but both times SOMEONE forgot his camera. Tuesday we went to downtown Dayton (Ohio, of course) to the National Aviation Museum and Wright Brothers Complex. We went there primarily to get Duane's senior's national parks pass. Woo Woo!!! Now we can get in any national park, site, memorial, or recreational area for free for life. We also get 1/2 price camping in any national park run campground. We stayed for a very pleasant and eye opening three hour visit of the complex. This consists of a very nice museum and gift shop, the historic Hoffman Building where the brothers ran one of their print shops, and one of the buildings where they ran their bicycle shops. Just outside of this complex is the site of the house they built and lived in for many years with their family. This house has been moved to Michigan and is now a part of the Greenfield Village Museum. The Complex is part of the Aviation Trail, a driving tour to various places around the area which are important in aviation history. The museum also pays tribute to Dayton native Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the first nationally published black writer. He wrote plays, song lyrics, essays and stories, but is best known for his poetry.

Today we visited Amish Country with our friend Barbara Harmon. Our first stop was Dover and the Warther Museum. This was our second visit and Barbara's fourth. Ernest "Mooney" Warther was a self-taught master carver who specialized in carving steam trains in perfect detail and perfect scale. One of his most famous is the Lincoln funeral train, carved in ebony and ivory. All of his trains moving parts actually move. They are assembled with tiny pins, as the glue available was unstable. Awsome. He is most famous for his pliars tree. He fashioned this from a single piece of wood. It consists of 511 working pliars made with 31ooo cuts and no shavings. It took two months. More awsome. From there we drove through Sugarcreek to Walnut Creek and had ice cream for lunch at one of the new shop complexes. After making various purchases and a serendipitous meeting with one of Barbara's cousins and his wife (small world!) we drove through beautiful rolling farm country to visit various craft shops in Berlin (BER lin) and Millersburg. There were many other towns and villages to visit but we only had one day so we just drove along Rt. 39. Supper at the Cracker Barrel in Hilliard (outside Columbus) rounded out our day trip.

Enough til later.

Louise and Duane