Day Ten (9/23) - Hardtack and Lumps of Coal

Mornings are a bit chilly around here, but the sun was bright and shining. I had a very exciting morning of laundry duty. It was very nice to have the laundry room just down the road, but there was only one washer and dryer, so I spent most of the day walking back and forth. At least it was only $1 a load here! I did meet the camp host's wife there, though. She actually retired from NPS and now they camp host at Little Beaver from April to November and go to Florida for the winter. Not a bad plan! Gabriella and I also met a friendly camp kitty that came to see us in the laundry room. That made Bella's day. To move things along a little, the kids even did their math sitting on benches in the sun outside the laundry room.

In addition to regular book work, we read part of You Wouldn't Want to be a Civil War Soldier to learn more about the soldiers' daily lives. We then made a common Union soldier food - hardtack. We had some along with our lunch with some honey and jam. It's made from flour, water, and salt - basically baked paste. It wasn't as bad as we had anticipated, though it was a tad hard to bite into. The kids actually liked it! Of course, the soldiers didn't have honey to put on it, and they had to carry it their pockets for days at a time, so it was nice and stale and mealy by the time they ate it. Yum.

Don's last meeting of the day was canceled, so at 3:30 we made an impromptu trip to the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine. A coal mine was not my first choice because of my slight case of claustrophobia, but the boys were very interested in going. The mine was discovered when the town bought the land to develop into a park. The entrance was discovered at the bottom of a pond, so they shored up the tunnels and started giving tours. A coal car pulled our little trolley cars down into the mine.

Our guide was a former electrician in the West Virginia mines. He was quite a character and showed us different equipment and techniques used in mining through the years.

Gabriella didn't like it when he turned off all of the lights to show just how dark it was in the mines (can't see your hand in front of your face,) but otherwise the kids thought it was pretty cool.  I do believe they have both decided that mining is not the life for them. They each got a gen-yoo-ine lump of WV coal to take home.

Looking back down the tunnel behind us

After the tour, we checked out restorations of a coal camp - houses for the men and their families, the superintendent's house, a school, etc. They also had a small youth museum on site. They had an architect's exhibit going on with many different building materials to experiment with. The kids could have spent all day long in there, but we only had twenty minutes until closing time. Oh well - we take what we can get!

We headed back to camp, but had to stop at an old-fashioned frozen custard place that bakes their own waffle cones every day. It's okay, though. It was our first ice cream stop for this leg of the trip!

When we got back, Bella and I made meatloaf and put it on the grill. We took a walk to the dumpster and stopped to play on the playground for a bit. I scared the tuna salad out of her a couple of times while playing hide and seek! We went back to finish dinner, then we all watched "The Princess and the Frog." I did get to see the season premiere of "Castle" - it happened to be on one of the two channels we get here. It's the little things in life that make us happy!