Spring Trip! Part 1: Serpent Mound

WE MADE IT.

By now, parents, siblings, and families have all probably heard many tales of epic adventure about our Spring trip. Between the parents, teachers, and photo-crazy students, I'm fairly certain that there are well over 11 million photos from this trip. Here are a few highlights from my camera. I'll start with Serpent Mound:

After a long, scenic drive through rural Ohio (and most of Ohio is rural), the kids were ready to run. Here we see them exploring the Serpent (and surrounding areas).

Of course, by "exploring," I mean "picking flowers" and "sinking into mud up to the knee..."

The mound sits on a ridge 100 feet above Ohio Brush Creek. 

A group shot on the observation tower. 

Serpent Mound was a really neat stopping point. It's out of the way (way out of the way), so we essentially had the place to ourselves for the duration of our visit. While there, I picked up a book called Indian Mounds of the Middle Ohio Valley. As it turns out, there are a lot of these mounds spread across Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, and Indiana. Serpent Mound is the largest, and generally the most well known. Others can be found on golf courses, in the parks of small towns, or tucked away in subdivisions. These mounds are often subtle, giving little clue that they represent the work of cultures that lived here one thousand years ago. (Artifacts found at Serpent Mound have been dated to 1030 AD.)

After lunch, a tour of the gift shop, and many, many photo ops, we loaded back onto our buses and resumed our long journey to Cave City, Kentucky.

The kids create their own serpent!