Fun in the Sun

We went to Henderson a few weeks ago to visit for the weekend. Since we missed my dad's birthday, I made him a tractor cake to make up for it! (a Ford tractor of course!) It was devoured within minutes, so I guess it tasted okay! This was the best picture I could get of dad with his cake. He is getting to be worse than Eli when it comes to cooperating for pictures...too busy cutting up! :)

So, what do we do for fun while we're visiting the folks? Well, when it's summer....what else would we do but go to the river?! It turned out to be a perfect, non-crowded day to go out on the water. Seth enjoyed getting tossed around some.

Mom and Dad even did a little skiing!

Happy Fourth!

This year to celebrate the Fourth of July, the Bowen crew headed out to the Huntsville Stars game. We chose to forego the usual family fireworks in the driveway and opted for the Stars' fireworks show. Despite the heat, all of us had a great time...except maybe for Myles. The heat got the best of the poor boy...he spent most of the game downstairs in the breeze of the walkway with whomever would carry him.

The fireworks were wonderful! I highly recommend going to a game that has a fireworks show afterwards!

I also made cupcakes for the occasion! I experimented on these with multi-colored icing. I think they turned out cute in a Captain America sort of way!

Too Hot for Yard Work...

...but we did it anyway! We don't have much time in the spring to get the big yard work done due to baseball. We have a few flower beds that desperately needed cleaning. So, a few Saturdays ago, Seth and I went and bought a truck load of mulch and got to work. We spent the entire day on two of the flower beds and they look tremendously better!!

Before:

After:

Before:


After:

Now we only have four more beds that could use the same thing! I think those will have to wait for cooler weather!

Bowen Baseball Roadtrip 2010, Day 3

Day 3: Philadelphia Phillies

It only took us about an hour and 45 minutes to get into Philly on this morning. We didn't have time to do any touring since the game was at 1PM and it would take us an estimated 2 hours to get back to Baltimore. We knew it would be a pretty rushed day with just the game because we needed to get to the Baltimore airport by 6PM to get through all the lines and make our flight at 8PM. (We believe in being early to airports. You just never know how busy it's going to be.) So, anyway...no touring, just a game for today. Which was totally fine with all the boys!

The Phillies ballpark was my favorite of all three parks we saw on this trip. It was very pretty and had some of the most delicious food!

We, as usual, got there in plenty of time to see batting practice. We were intently watching as a ball was hit toward Caleb in hopes that he would get it. When all of a sudden Seth hollers at Chad to look out.

A ball was hit right to him and since no one else was paying attention, Chad got the ball!

Like I said earlier, they had plenty of delicious food that we were not ashamed to stuff our faces with!

We had a wonderful time at the game and even got these two pictures that are definitely some of my favorites for the trip!

Now...if you think this is the end of the story, you are sadly mistaken. If you will notice in the picture above, we are oblivious to the fact that there are some VERY dark clouds rolling in. It was the 8th inning when we realized that it might start raining so we could just go ahead and leave...hoping to beat the crowds and make it to the airport even earlier. We got about halfway to our car and the wind picked up a little and a few sprinkles started coming down. Seth and Chad decided it would be best to run back to the car and beat the rain. Caleb and I called them sissies and continued walking. Just a minute later, it felt like a hurricane was coming for us! Of course, Seth and Chad were already in the car. The wind started blowing so hard that Caleb and I could barely walk, forget running! Luckily, we made it to the car right before the bottom dropped out of the sky!



This picture does not do the storm justice by any means! There were times when you could not see the car in front of you! Needless to say, traffic was at a standstill. Our only thought was oh well...it'll clear up in a minute and we'll get going. At this time, we had about 2 1/2 hours to make it to the airport by our 6PM plan. Well...it took us about 30 minutes to even be on our way to getting out of Baltimore...now our time was down to 2 hours. Which would have been okay, because remember it only took a little less than 2 hours to get to Philly. What happened next?? Traffic jam after traffic jam! I nervously watched the ETA on our Garmin as our minutes just melted away. Before we knew it our ETA went from 5:30 to 6 to 6:15...and we were still in traffic. At this rate, we knew there was NO WAY we would make our flights. I admit, I was not in the best of moods at this point, as I'm sure the boys will tell you. I just knew we were gonna be shelling out some serious moolah to get us on another plane home.

Finally, we broke free of the traffic and made it to the car rental place at about 6:45...and on to the airport by about 7PM. We thought we had a pretty good chance of making it until we saw the security lines. Booo. Luckily, they opened up a couple more lines and we were through there and to our gate with about 30 minutes to spare! Just enough time to grab some McDonalds and board the plane! Whew!

A couple hours later we were happily back in Huntsville! We love going on trips, but we also LOVE coming home!!

Bowen Baseball Roadtrip 2010, Day 2

Day 2: Washington Nationals


We got up and drove into DC this day with plans on doing some touring before the game. The drive into DC was only supposed to be about an hour long. We even timed it so that we would miss rush hour. However, the trip turned into about an hour and a half thanks to a car stopped on the SIDE of the road causing a severe case of rubbernecking. Luckily, we were all well rested and had full bellies, so this only caused a minimal amount of frustration. We finally got out of the traffic and made it to Union Station with no problems, shockingly! We had tickets for a hop on-hop off tour bus around DC. There was a bus waiting for us as soon as we got our tickets, so we hopped right on and commenced our touring.


We only had a few hours to cram as much as possible in. The boys didn't get to see everything, but we at least hit some of the bigger and more convenient things to get to.

Seth took this picture! I thought it turned out great! He may claim to be all jock, but he has an artistic streak in him!

This turned out to be one of my favorite pictures. Not because of the picture itself, but because of what is going on behind the scenes. I had three boys simultaneously telling me to move that hand up and this hand down...I was so confused and too busy laughing at them, that I of course didn't get it exactly right. Oh well, I guess it's close enough!

Once we got tired of walking around in the heat, we wondered into a couple of the Smithsonian museums. They had some pretty neat stuff on display. Definitely worth a walk through, especially if you go when there are fewer crowds.

Eventually, we made it to the Nationals game and lucked into getting some pictures with the former President himself!

The Nationals have a very nice and clean stadium. However, there is not really anything there to set it apart from other stadiums. We still very much enjoyed the game!

We got to see Starusburg throw 9 strikouts in his first loss. Yea! and Booo! at the same time.

We also got to see Josh Willingham play. Seth's claim to fame is that Josh hit a homerun off of him when they played in college. :) And of course, we enjoyed some more marvelous ice cream!! YUMM!!

Day 2 also turned out to be a success. We crammed in as much as we could and didn't get lost one single time! We made it back to the hotel in time to catch some of the College World Series and get a good night's rest.

Bowen Baseball Roadtrip 2010, Day 1

As you know, Seth and I are trying to see every MLB stadium...this is of course a long-term goal! :) Last year we went to NYC for our anniversary and caught a Mets and a Yankees game. This year Seth wanted to take his brothers with us for a graduation present. So after much searching for the best deals out there, we finally decided on our destination: Baltimore! And Philadelphia! And DC!! Yes, that's right...we decided on taking in three MLB games in three different cities. But that's not all...we were going to do this in THREE days!! "Insanity!" some might say! Naahh, would be our response! That just makes it more exciting! So, let me tell you about our whirlwind adventure...


Day 1: Baltimore Orioles



We lucked out and found the perfect flights between Huntsville and Baltimore for very reasonable prices. Our flight left EARLY on Day 1 and came back late on Day 3. This is what allowed us to do the trip sooo quickly. After checking in and getting to our gate, we didn't sit down for two seconds before they were boarding the plane....and off we went!



We arrived in Baltimore 20 minutes earlier than scheduled! That's unheard of! Way to go AirTran! We were able to check into our hotel early and rest for a few minutes (aka check ESPN for any major sports happenings...oh the joys of traveling with boys!) Once the boys got their SportsCenter fix, we headed into Baltimore. Our first stop was Camden Yards. It was way early for the game, so we figured it was the perfect time to take some pictures outside the stadium. When we walk up the first thing the boys notice is that the gates are open for some reason.

I wasn't turned around for two seconds....when I turned back they had decided we might as well go on in! We could apologize later if we weren't supposed to be in there. :)

After a delicious lunch at Hard Rock Cafe, we wondered around Inner Harbor for a while.


Once the boys got bored with that, they decided we could try out the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum. It was only 6 bucks a person...that's a steal of a deal, right? ....Wrong. If you are planning a trip to Baltimore, let me go ahead and warn you. Biggest.Waste.Of.Money. If this had been free, it might have been a pretty neat little stop. However, in our opinion (and keep in mind I have three baseball fanatics with me), it's not worth it. It was very small...just a little memorabilia and a few pictures to look at. And it wasn't even air-conditioned well! It might have been worth it if it had served as an escape from the blistering heat...but no. Oh well...at least we had a sense of humor about it! It served as a pretty good joke for the rest of the trip!




Finally, it was game time! The Orioles have a beautiful park! The boys enjoyed watching batting practice. Seth even caught a BP home run ball!

Once BP was over, the search for food was on! I turned around once to see if Seth was following me and he had stopped to ask for some advice. "So fellas, what's the best thing to eat in this place?" They unanimously decided: Boog's BBQ. So that's what we got and it was delicious!

We don't do a lot of souvenir buying on these baseball trips. Instead, we get ice cream in a hat and a souvenir drink. Food and a take home gift! What could be better?!

All in all, Day 1 went very well! We didn't get lost, had some good food, and enjoyed a perfect evening for a ballgame!