Let's go to the beach

A tradition of the East coast Service Adventure units is the annual Memorial Day weekend trip to Raleigh, NC. The highlight of this trip is going to the beach on Saturday. The warm weather has usually arrived and everyone is excited to unwind, relax, swim, play games, and get sun-burned. Yeah, the other tradition is "sunburn Sunday" at Raleigh Mennonite Church. This year there was plenty of sun, but the burns weren't as bad as the parking. You would think this tradition would have a manual on how to find good parking over the first biggest travel weekend of the summer?!? Todd says he'll have a plan next year so we don't have to drop people off and shuttle drivers two miles away. Typically the units are winding down to their last week or so before closure week so it's a nice time to share stories from the year and relax before parting ways. We also celebrated Ian's sixth birthday when we arrived Friday.

Before we made it to Raleigh though, we planned on driving about half the seven hour trip and camp for the night. (See last year's post for our previous Raleigh camping experience). The weather forecast was not looking in our favor, so we decided at the last minute to sleep in our dry beds and leave at 7AM instead. We had reservations at an exhibition coal mine that we still wanted to make Friday morning. The Beckley Exhibition coal mine was a real mine but has been inactive since 1912. Before our tour started we had time to walk around the museum and other "coal town" buildings, including a pretty cool kids museum. It was fantasy storybook themed so you could dress up and sit in Cinderella's carriage, climb Rapinzel's tower and sit at a cobbler's bench from, well I don't know what story that was from. The coal mine tour was interesting. We rode into the underground mine in small coal cars and were led by a retired miner. He stopped us at several spots and demonstrated the evolution of mining technologies throughout the years. For example, he showed us a wooden cage that miners used to carry Canaries in to know if the gases in the mine were too high to sustain life. Nowadays they carry a small electronic meter. He also demonstrated how different lamps worked.

In Cinderella's carriage

Our guide

In the coal car