A Raleigh Fun Time

This past weekend we went up for a quick visit to Raleigh. We've lived in North Carolina for almost 5 years now and figured it was about time we check it out. We left Saturday morning around 9:00 after stopping by the Harris Teeter (grocery store for you out-of-staters) for some breakfast muffins and a DVD to watch on the computer after the kids went to bed. We had a few nursing and potty stops along the way, but we made it up there around 12:00.

Our first stop was the capital building uptown. Dave was somewhat disappointed by the size, but I'm sure he was comparing it to the last capital building we saw in Austin, TX. (Think our nation's capital but bigger.)

After our little walking tour, we headed over to the Marbles Kids Museum for lunch and the exhibits. This turned out to be well worth the trip alone. It was a fantastic place for Mason, and he had a blast. I highly recommend our Charlotte friends to make the drive with their little ones if they haven't yet seen it. There are lots of interactive exhibits and things to climb on and water to play in specifically geared towards the toddler set.

Mason loved the little post office\ package delivery section the best. I think he could have moved those packages down the rolling bars for hours:
He also enjoyed walling himself in with giant lego blocks:

And playing in the "peas and carrots" ball pit:

Lauren wasn't too impressed and she fell asleep:

After the museum, we headed to the hotel which Mason had been looking forward to all week. (He's been playing "hotel" ever since the last time we stayed in one.) We all enjoyed the pool for a little while and then got the kids to bed pretty early.

We got a room with a separate bedroom area so we were able to put Mason to bed and not disturb him while we watched the movie we rented on our laptop (while Lauren slept in her pack-n-play in the kitchen.

The next day we went back uptown to see the NC Museum of Natural Sciences which was right across from the capital. It was well worth the price of admission - it was free. The exhibits were much better than I anticipated for a free museum. There's even a full dinosaur skeleton on display. Mason was mostly interested in riding the elevator to go between floors though.

After the museum, we took our first stab at Geocaching. If you're not familiar, it's a type of world-wide hide and seek game where you use your GPS and some latitude\longitude coordinates to find an object hidden by some other geocacher. I looked up a coordinate and knew there was one right outside the capital, but I'm either not very good with my GPS or the hidden object was not there anymore. It was supposed to be a relatively easy find, so I'm going to have to try this again somewhere else. (There's supposedly one hidden very near my house, so that will be my next try.)

We headed home around 3:00 and were all warn out from our quick trip by the time we got home. All in all, it was a fun way to celebrate Father's Day weekend.