Vacation Part 3 --Pennsylvania

We arrived in Pennsylvania on a Tuesday evening after 4 hours of driving.  We decided to just have fast food and go swimming.  It worked out that we stayed in a Best Western in both places, kind of funny.  I wish I could have combined the amenities of the two hotels and it would have been perfect.  Anyway, we came to Pennsylvania to attend the Little League World Series in Williamsport.  We decided not to pay $200+ per night to stay in Williamsport and stayed about 40 minutes away in Danville.  And, about 20 minutes from there, nestled beautifully in the mountains, was a super cool amusement park called Knoebels.  We spent a chunk of our Wednesday there.  Funny how weather works, we were there on August 14 and it was in the 50s.  I had on shorts and a sweatshirt and in the morning I was cold.  It warmed up a bit in the afternoon, thankfully!  The admission to this park was free.  You simply had to pay per ride.  Online it looked like there were a lot of rides right at Aria's level.  We decided to get her a day pass, which was $22, but a random person handed us a $5 off coupon.  Most of the rides were between $0.75 and $1.50.  Aria easily doubled her value of rides for the $17 we paid.  Justin and I purchased $25 worth of tickets to ride some of the bigger rides with her.  We brought our own picnic and only bought a couple of treats for food.  We spent about $50 and had an absolute blast.  Definitely could not do that at a major theme park.  We probably couldn't even get in for $50 as a family.   

First ride we go to as a family is the Tilt-A-Whirl.  Justin is a spinny ride kind of guy and I thought I might throw up after one ride.  Aria is like her dad.  She was willing to try anything!  I like rides.  I just don't want to keep spinning and spinning and spinning...

Here are some of my favorite pictures from the day:

Love the facial expressions in this action shot!

She rode these fire trucks at least 3 times.  She has a funny stick out your tongue thing going.

Doesn't she look so happy!

Wouldn't be an amusement park without a carousel.

See her goofy tongue thing again?  She gets it from her dad.  :)

The view from the top of the Ferris wheel.  Beautiful country!

It was windy up there!

It is kind of hard to see, but we are making silly faces at Daddy from the hot air balloons.

I think we exceeded the 160 lb weight limit on this one, but oh well.

Okay so I love the continuous shutter on my camera.  It is great for capturing awesome facial expressions and flying hair on cool rides such as The Mixer.

We went on this one as a family one time, too.  It was a great ride!



 

We had such a great time at Knoebels.  We rode almost all the rides that Aria was within the height requirements.  We didn't do the log ride because it was too cold and there was a boat ride and a small roller coaster that had really long lines we didn't wait in.  Otherwise we did it all.  It had larger roller coasters and things for bigger people, but we were content enjoying the day with Aria.  We got to go on a 1.5 mile train ride into a wooded area with a creek and some squirrels to look at.  We rode a falling star type ride and a crazy submarine boat thing.  There weren't hardly any lines for most of the things we wanted to do.  It was just awesome.  If you are ever in central Pennsylvania, I highly recommend Knoebels!  And of course, the last thing we had to do as we walked out of the park, Justin had to do the speed pitch game.  Of course he exceeded the day's previous best by almost 20 mph and won Aria a prize.  What a great dad!

Yep, he's still got that funky arm angle thing going.

We left the park and headed for Williamsport to go the Little League World Series parade.  Aria had a snooze in the 1 hour drive through the beautiful Pennsylvania countryside.  The parade was to start at 6:00 and we got there just a few minutes before.  I'm not sure if it was late in starting or if we were just way down the line, but we didn't see any action until about 6:45.  We had not had supper yet.  The parade candy and treats were welcomed by all three of us.  It was actually an amazing parade!  All 16 teams were on floats in the parade along with a whole slew of other things.  It was still going at 8:30 when we decided we had to have something more substantial to eat.  It was fun to join in the excitement and atmosphere for the big World Series.  Williamsport is not real big and it was obvious that this is the main event every year.  I loved the hometowny feeling.  At 8:30 we went and picked up a Domino's pizza and ate it in the car on the way back to the hotel.  Now that's how you roll on vacation!  Aria did so great at just going with the flow.  We had such a blast!  More on the actual World Series in another post.  Here are some pictures from the parade:

All the teams rode these large floats with one US team on one side and one International team on the other side.

Here is the team from Iowa!!

They were paired up with Japan, who won the whole tournament.  We also got some cool candy from Japan from them.  We didn't eat those pieces.

Aria loves mascots and Frenchy the french fry was alright, but...

...this vacuum guy was way too scary!  She kept saying she didn't want to see that scary big black guy.  I was really hoping she would use different words to describe him.  I guess he does look kind of mean.  They were part of an advertisement for Honda's new van that has a vacuum inside.