Summer's Here!

School's out for Summer ... and has been for a month and a half already (see Abigail with her friend and teachers below, taken at the end of term on May 17th)!! The temperature's definitely reflecting the summer months though ... today's forecast 100 degrees!! Phew!

One thing we LOVE about life out here are all the fun days that you can enjoy with your family over the summer months ... without spending a penny if you don't want to, or very little if you do! We have already had fun at the Zemba Bros family field day. Abigail loved the pony rides and bounce houses, had fun on the diggers and running through tubes and mazes with a friend we bumped into there and we all enjoyed the hay ride! Last year Naomi slept through the whole experience at only 5 weeks old, this year she enjoyed it so much more!

On the evening of the first Friday of every month from May to September, Main Street in Coshocton gets shut off and there are all kinds of fun things to enjoy. A community evening where the shops stay open late, there are sometimes little crafts or games for the kids, free candy & ice-cream, dancing or skateboarding in the street, raffles to enter and lots more. It changes each month too, so you never know quite what to expect. We went to 'First Friday' in June and there was the chance to sit in a fire engine, which Abigail enjoyed along with a couple of her friends. Then we had a ride on the wobbly 'Magic Train' before enjoying free ice-cream, offered by a local political candidate looking for a vote ... we enjoyed the ice-cream without letting on that we're British and won't get a say anyway!!!!

Probably our favourite weekend of the year here is in June with the Hot Air Balloon Festival at the County Fairground and the Corvette Car Rally in Roscoe Village (again all Free!). The previous two years, the weather hasn't been all that good for hot air balloon flying, so the launches have been hit and miss but this, our final year, we weren't disappointed. We went to the Fairground on the Saturday afternoon and enjoyed the fair rides ... either waving down from them or up at them!! Naomi LOVED the stromboli and chomped her way through quite a lot of one!

The highlight of the evening and the only year that we've actually been at the Fairground to see it, was the launch of 22 different balloons right before our eyes! We live close enough that they usually fly over our house but this year we got to see it all from the stands ... and all four of us got really excited about it!

Having taken loads of photos of the Corvettes in Roscoe the last two years, this year we decided to just go and enjoy the atmosphere. We spotted new licence plate variations that we hadn't seen before that made us laugh. We always ask Abigail to decide which car she like the most when we go. This year it was an easy decision ... the one with the Treasure Chest in the boot (trunk!) ... so nothing to do with the car itself at all!

This will be the last summer we get to enjoy all of these things. Third time round, we still can't quite get our heads round the fact that most of it is free. Apart from the rides at the fair and the stromboli, we paid nothing for all that fun! It is certainly one aspect of small town American living that we will miss but know that life in Tanzania will have new adventures of it's own!