This weekend was the one we’d been working towards for the last five weeks; The Great Park Pursuit Grand Finale. This year’s final event was held at Breakheart Reservation in Saugus. One of the things that struck both Lisa and I about this whole program is the sheer volume of parks that exist in Massachusetts, sometimes in the midst of heavily urban areas. Breakheart reservation is a great example of an urban park. Overflow parking is in a strip mall with a Target, and then in a few steps you’re walking in 600+ acres of protected forest land. The only thing similar that I’ve ever seen before are the Forest Preserves of Chicago.

Although the real draw of this event was the competition for the Grand Prize packages there still was a lot to do and see. Piper is pictured above taking a spin in a all-terrain wheelchair sponsored by the DCR’s universal access program and to the left she’s making a bird feeder with peanut butter and a pine cone. She also colored a filter paper leaf using dyes, toured the DCR’s mobile maple sugar shack, and searched for candy hidden in a hay pile. Here Piper is pictured trying her hand at using a two-man pull saw, or in this case it would be a two woman saw since Lisa was on the other end. At the sugar shack we were able to ask questions about maple syrup grading and sampled some of the syrup made from the sap of trees located along the Fellsway.
We also joined a DCR Ranger on a nature walk where we learned that native Hemlock trees are slowly being wiped out by an Asian beetle, that chipmunks make perfectly round holes, and that you can tell the age of a sapling by the number of levels of branches that it has.

But the main event was yet to come. All the teams who participated in at least 5 of the 6 events qualified as semi-finalists and were eligible to take a quiz which would allow them to compete for the grand prize packages. Since we had attended all of the events we took the quiz and did well enough to make it to the final round. I’m not sure how the teams who missed one of the events managed to get any of the answers right for the event they missed because the quiz had specific questions that you would have been hard pressed to answer if you had not been there.

We became one of the lucky fourteen who advanced to the next round of competition. We had to compete in four events: “fishing”, spray can target practice, croquette, and s’more tower building. You may remember from last week’s post that Piper spent quite a bit of time “fishing” with a magnet at GPP #5 and we think that she benefited from the practice because she was a ringer for the first event. Rather than magnets we were using velcro “whiffle” golf balls and felt fish. Piper was pulling them in so quickly that our DCR “shepherd” was having trouble keeping up with her. I requited myself well enough, but I think I was pretty well schooled by my 7 year-old daughter. We were told later that we scored over 200 points on this event!

Practicing with the spray tank at GPP #4 came in handy for the next competition. We had to use a spray tank to knock down 2 liter bottles and pop cans. Each can was worth 10 points and a two liter was worth 5 points. We were only allowed to pump the can three times. Piper managed to knock down 1 two liter bottle and I hit three cans and one bottle. They took the higher score of the adult and the child, so we ended up with 35 points for this stage of the competition.

We elected Lisa to compete for us in the croquette competition. Piper had a little trouble with this event and failed to get the ball through the wicket in the required three hits. Lisa managed to secure us one additional point by getting the ball in with her final hit. We didn’t spend any time playing croquette at the other GPP events and I guess it showed. Lisa was a champ though, her years of mini golf mastery pulled her through in a clutch. She was saying that it was blind luck, but I never bet against blind luck in a competition like this one.

The final event was the s’more tower competition. The rules of this game were pretty simple: each team was given a fixed number of graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate and one minute to build the tallest tower that they could. Each layer of the tower had to contain chocolate, marshmallows, and be sandwiched between graham crackers. Things started off well and then our tower shifted precipitously. I impressed the ranger and Lisa by quickly building a cantilever and used the weight from the level above to hold everything in place. We ended up at six and a half inches and was one of the taller structures that got built in competition.

We were done! All that was left to do now was wait for the results to be announced. They started with the 14th position and worked up to the final four who would each win one of the grand prize packages. We figured that we had done pretty well, but thought we’d be no higher than in the top ten. Things started to get pretty interesting when they were about to announce the 5th place team and we were still in the running. One of the other families that we had become friendly with were also in the same boat with us! I remember looking over at them and giving the old eyebrow wiggle. I felt badly when they got called as being #5, just out of the prizes.

We had won! We just didn’t know which of the four prize packages we would end up with. The grand prize winner was announced and we knew then that we hadn’t taken first place, but we were plenty excited to find out that we were in SECOND!. Yeah, Brown Barbaloots! Since the grand prize winner took the kayak package we knew right away that we would take the canoe package. We had won a 15 foot canoe with all kinds of other stuff from L.L.Bean. HOW COOL IS THAT!? We were obviously quite excited, and more than a little bit shocked.

So, thank you to the DCR and L.L.Bean. We had a wonderful time even without winning. We’ll see you next year!

The Brown Barbaloots

This weekend’s Great Park Pursuit was the big one that we’ve been waiting for! GPP #5 was the Coastal Discovery and Camp Out at Scusset Beach State Reservation in Sandwich, MA. Located right along the Cape Cod Canal with the Beach right on Cape Cod Bay this park also has a large campground and access to bike trails running along the canal. Since this event was quite a bit of a haul for us, we ended up getting there a little later than usual and had to scoot right along to see all of the activities. Piper is pictured above “fishing” for some of the species found in the Bay. She learned to identify them and was taught the legal sizes and bag limits. I admit not very useful knowledge for a vegetarian, but you never know when a kernel of knowledge will come in handy. We also had a chance to try our hand at the real thing in the Canal (no luck). Speaking of Vegetarians, I thought it was kind of silly to have the veggie DCR educator be the one stuck with cutting up the raw squid that we were using for bait. Poor lady – that’s over and above the call of duty.
As you can see we hauled the bikes along to take advantage of the Bike Path. The poor Prius was loaded down like a pack mule, and despite my worries the bikes didn’t even fall off the back of the car to be dashed to a billion bits by a passing semi. Riding on the canal was great. Lisa and I were marveling at how quickly little girl has progressed on her bicycle. She only learned how to ride two months ago and now she looks like a pro!

The Fire Protection Service had a mock up of a fire tower that you could go into and learn how they locate fires. In the picture the Fire Officer is demonstrating the tool they use to determine the relative bearing of the smoke. In the background you can see the map they use to plot the bearings. Piper got a quick lesson on triangulation using that map. Its pretty low tech, but very effective. Each Fire Tower is plotted on the board and a hole is drilled at their location on the map. Around each tower is drawn a 360 degree “protractor” and a string with a weight at one end and a push pin attached to the other is fed through the hole. So to locate a fire you take your bearing, pull the string out along the bearing on the protractor, stick your pin into the board, call your friendly neighboring Fire tower to do the same, repeat the process with their measurements, and where the strings cross is where your fire is located. Cool huh?

There were other displays of coastal marine life, such as the one showing the different kinds of crabs indigenous to the area (above), the challenges faced by shore birds such as the Piping Plover, and the danger of beachings by marine mammals. Piper is practicing moving a beached “dolphin” in the picture to the above right. Cape Cod has the third highest incidence of beachings by marine mammals in the world. The gentlemen shown in the picture speculated that it may be the result of the unique geography of the Cape and the relatively close proximity of deep water. The animals literally never see it coming until it is too late, and since they are social creatures the whole group ends up sharing the same fate.

Finally, no trip to the beach would be a trip to the beach without going to, you know, the beach. We closed up the day making sand castles while waiting for four o’clock to come so we could get our camping location assignment.

I don’t have any pictures of the camping area, but it is the same place as shown in the picture of Piper moving the dolphin. Wicked hard ground. You could tell that we were in a hurry because we remembered the camp stove, but forgot the pots, and my contact gear, and a flashlight, and a hammer to pound the tent stakes in with… I have to give myself credit for making due without contact solution or a lens case. I ended up using the cap from the camp stove propane and the sealing lid to the water jug. Add a little water, place them all on the dashboard of the Prius and you’re in business. Blind, but in business. All in all it was a very nice experience and we had a good time camping. This one was Piper’s favorite. Last weekend is this Saturday. The Grand Finale! Wish us luck in competing for the grand prize packages.

OK, how cool would it be to have J. K. Rowling as your commencement speaker?

Definitely worth watching or reading…

2008 Harvard Commencement Speech

Good post over at Bonny Glen about the common arguments people give for not home educating.