Forest of the Past

Today the kids and I took a ride to the Fontenelle Forest Nature Preserve just south of Omaha. They had a special event called "Forest of the Past." As you can see from the photo above, we enjoyed some Native American song and dance. His traditional costume was beautiful and it was quite a moving thing to see. The Forest has a wonderful interpretive center that we enjoyed...Lewis & Clark are pretty big in these parts, so we got our fill of maps, pictures, exhibits etc... For lunch we ate Indian Fried Bread tacos and the kids made awesome keychains for their backpacks out of beads and feathers.
Other events on hand were birds of prey, story tellers, and our favorite the Archealogy Dig. They had dirt loaded with bone fragments, shards of pottery, shells, etc...and if you found an arrowhead you could take it home! Liv found one on her own, and a nice boy gave an extra one to Tony. They were quite pleased with their treasures.

The preserve is laden with miles of trails. We chose the 1 mile boardwalk hike as it was quite hot today and it was nice and shady along that route. The hike has 24 spots to "rest" with informational plaques about the area, Lewis & Clark, etc... and I'm quite certain I read each one outloud. They were having 2 hour guided History Hikes, where I guess you could still the wagon tracks from the Mormom Trail and other wonderful sites. We decided we weren't up for the challenge, maybe another day. When we got to the van, my temperature gauge said 106. Once we started driving it went down a bit....still HOT and in the high 90's with no relief in sight for the next week.

As for Chris, we wish he would've been with us! According to the message he left us, he got "locked out" of the office at the plant so is without his temporary cell phone and computer. He and some other guys are taking a train ride to Liverpool tomorrow so we'll be excited to hear about that.