4th of July weekend we went to Ohio for a mini vacation with some friends and their kiddos. Why Ohio? Just because it was close, and we had a place to stay with our friend’s parents. Their home was amazing, almost resort like…made you forget you were just in Ohio.

We visited Put-In-Bay on Friday. I didn’t even know Lake Erie had islands in the first place, but it was really neat. We ate at the downtown harbor and also went to Heineman Winery which specializes in Catawba grapes. We had a winery tour and tasting and then had a chance to walk through the world’s largest geode – which was awesome! Apparently the land owners started digging for a well years and years ago and stumbled on a cave in the earth and realized they’d discovered a geode large enough for people to walk through. Very neat!

Saturday the 4th we just lounged by the pool and enjoyed some down time. I read a book for the first time in a long time and Andy played in the pool with the kids for hours. I think it was a good experience for him, lol. We had a great seafood cookout for dinner and then watched fireworks from the front lawn. A guy in the neighborhood buys tons of fireworks and puts on a show each year. We were told his show was “slightly better than amateur” – and I honestly didn’t know what to expect. Turns out, they were awesome. I don’t know how much money the guy spends on fireworks every year but it really was quite a spectacular show for being set off in the middle of the neighborhood! Sorry no pictures, but my fireworks pics never seem to turn out anyway.

Sunday we introduced geocaching to our friends and let their daughter use the GPS to guide us to a few caches. We’d actually found a travel bug at home that had wanted to get itself to Ohio, so we brought it along and left it in a cache we found. After hiking we headed to Dairy Queen and settled in for the drive back to NY.