A Crafter's Presidents' Day

So it's Presidents' Day today, and what better way to celebrate any kind of day off with a paper crafting project?! (Not really patriotic, but it has the names of two Presidents! Close enough for me.) Today's project is something that I scrap-lifted off of Pinterest (of course), but changed the state shapes. Since we are moving out of Monroe and out to Washington, we thought it would be a good project to show for today. In making this project, we found that the Cricut 50 States shape cartridge doesn't cut out really great outlines of the states, but it does cut out the other shapes pretty well. So the shapes were cut out of an outline of the states.

It sure will look great hanging up on our bare wall!

(It's the one and only time Connecticut is bigger than Washington. If they were really cut proportionately, you wouldn't have been able to see it!)

Day Eighty-Four- All Truths, No Lies

After talking to Luke last night, our plans changed. We were planning on heading up to Pittsburgh, but, unfortunately, it didn't work out. Kind of a bummer because we would have gone driving today, which turned out to be a much nicer day. Anyway, we decided to head home. After 80+ days on the road, the idea of sleeping in our own beds was so tempting! Before we left, we texted Mom and told her what our "plans" were. We told her that we were going for a drive through West Virginia. Not a lie- we just went a little farther. And longer. But, Mom said she wouldn't bother us today. Aunt Debbie played along with us, and just told us to e-mail her when we got to Connecticut. She also said she wouldn't answer if Mom called her. So, at about 9:00, we headed for home. The drive wasn't too bad. We were on back roads for much of the drive, until we got near Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. From there, we got onto I-84 and it was a straight shot home. There wasn't that much traffic in Pennsylvania or New York, really. I think Mom texted once and asked where we were. We told her we were still on the road (also not a lie), and then left us alone again. It was amazing when we got into Connecticut. Not because we missed it so much but because the amount of traffic increased greatly. People were honking for no reason, etc. Such a friendly place... We stopped at the Danbury rest area, which is actually pretty nice (but apparently they're shutting it down. Makes tons of sense...) At around 7:30, we pulled onto our street and decided to give Mom a call. I started talking to her and couldn't stop laughing. It wasn't even that funny. We kept talking until we pulled in the driveway and knocked on the door. All you could hear was, "Bob, get the door, I'm on the phone!!" Dad didn't sound too happy, but answered it anyway. He was quite shocked to see us, and then Mom was like, "Who's there??" and then she realized it was just us. She wasn't very happy with our "lying", but everything was the truth, but she got over it. The rest of the night was spent talking, which went much better than expected. There weren't too many interrogating questions. Now, it is time to sleep in our own beds!! Hopefully we won't be woken up early tomorrow!!

Day One: Canada, Eh?

We left home (only) an hour and a half later than we planned, but we finally left around 9:30. Our first stop was to see the World's Second Largest Garden Gnome. You would think that it would be difficult to hide a garden gnome 15 feet high, but we couldn't find it anywhere!! We looked and looked all over the small town in New York and couldn't spot it. That's why we aren't detectives, I guess... But we did spot a very interesting consolation prize- a *very bad* fake cow on Rollerblades. Who knew!
After about 6 more hours of driving through New York, and several very heavy downpours, we saw signs for Niagara Falls. Of course, with our combined ability of using the GPS, we managed to get turned around quite a bit. (Sad, I know.) Then we had to sit on the bridge to get to Canada for about 35 minutes. I was kind of surprised that we only lost a total of 50 minutes on our entire trip today! That might be a record for the two of us over such a long drive. And of course, there were very few rooms left in town, since there are apparently a lot of Connecticut people around (according to the hotel clerk), we had to settle for an overpriced room. Oh well, I guess that's what we get for waiting around too long.
Anyway, after we had the room all set, we decided to take a walk down to the Falls. Thinking it was a short walk, we left the hotel around 7. Well, it was about a 3.5 mile walk. Should've put on the running shoes. We checked out the Falls. Did some of the touristy stuff. Then we decided to stick around to see them lit up at night. The friendly police officer said that they were lit around 9:30, so we decided to stop and get a coffee to waste some time. We wasted a little bit too much time, and they were already lit up by the time we went back. They did look very pretty though! We decided that it was time to make the 3.5 mile trip back to the hotel, uphill this time. Definitely got in a great  lower body workout with all that walking around, after doing all that sitting!
We are going to check out the Maid of the Mist tomorrow morning and then off to Toronto for a couple of days.
A link to pictures will follow tomorrow.
Thanks for checking in!

States Visited: Connecticut, New York (2/50)
Provinces Visited: Ontario (1/10)
License Plates Seen: California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia (24/50)