Earth Day And Neuseway Park

We had a busy earth day!! (Yes it was a couple days ago but the festivities were today). A local club had a kids fishing day at the pond next to us. I was left holding the worms, so I decided to go pick up trash (sadly there was a LOT).

– Dacen held a dead water moccasin/cotton mouth. Luckily I’m not afraid of snakes because that boy is a little obsessed. We learned a lot about snakes from the teens who killed it. We later found out even though the snake DID have the diamond shaped head and other appropriate markings, it was another very similar looking snake. So, Dacen STILL wants to hold a cotton mouth. Sigh.

– Caden rescued a turtle who was trying to cross the road. There’s a joke there I’m sure!

– Brielle rescued an injured or stunned toad. Sadly it was camera shy and hopped out of her hands before we could take the picture.

    

– The kids did some other activities at the nature center while I did boring mom stuff like laundry and grocery shopping.

– We ended the day roasting marshmallows and eating hamburgers to celebrate Dacen’s friends who did amazing at world’s vex IQ robotics!! (Their team name is Flying Hamburgers!)

We really loved this campground. Ok I admit, we’ve liked almost all the campgrounds we’ve stayed in.  There have been a couple exceptions, but there’s almost always something we love about the campground. Kinston doesn’t have a lot to do (I think our only real reason to come was to eat at the Chef and the Farmer restaurant), so luckily this campground DID have a lot to do. There was the free Nature Center. We checked on Oliver the Umbrella Cocatoo 2-3 times a day. He talked and sang Happy Birthday and the kids got him to dance a couple times. While there we would check in on the various snakes and chat with Al, the employee who was always full of information. He was the one who pointed out the fishing and other earth day activities and made sure we knew all about them. 

There was even a cave down below the nature center and 2 cages out back with an owl and a hawk. I was sad about some of the animals being in cages until we were told they were brought here for rehabilitation and release. The ones still here can’t be released for various reasons.

The free planetarium was great too!! There were so many hands on exhibits for the kids. I think not much of the info was new for my kids, but they sure had fun there! There was a giant heart they could crawl through. A vacuum tube that they could send messages to each other across the room. Even better – it went upstairs and if you stood in one of 2 places you could watch it go up to the 2nd floor and back down to the other station! There was a huge mouth and stomach you could crawl through. I never did ask what it looked like inside. There was a room with fire safety stuff (geared more to preK) and a room with Honeybees (they didn’t have a queen and their beekeeper was delivering one soon). The Foucault pendulum clock was fun to keep tabs on and see it knock down another peg. Upstairs was all the space exhibits. And the planetarium. We’ve been fortunate to attend a couple of astronomy lessons on our trip, so a lot was review, but it was nice since she had it set to the night sky for this area of the country and this time of year.
  

Friday the kids and I set up shop upstairs at one of the tables so we could do school work and watch the VEX IQ Robotics Worlds competition. The team Dacen was on last year and 1st semester this year was competing again. Dacen really wanted to be there in person to cheer them on, but we tried our best to catch the matches real-time online.

Outside there was a huge playground and a dinosaur dig where they regularly bring in shark’s teeth and various bones for the kids to excavate and match to pictures to see what they have found.
 

All in all we had a great time here.