A Trip to the Forest History Center

A visit to the Forest History Center in Grand Rapids has been on my list of places to go with kidlets for quite some time.  Near the end of last week we were throwing some possible ideas out of places we might want to go for a day trip.  We considered the state fair, but decided against it because of the crowds of people and the fact that it was going to be rather warm down in the cities and the fact that we didn’t know exactly what we were doing and didn’t want to deal with the stress of navigating that chaos with four kids let us to look elsewhere.  So we took a nice hour long drive over to Grand Rapids to check out the Forest History Center.

Dr. Peds and I love living history, and the big kidlets eat it up too.  At the Forest History Center there is a neat museum, but even better, a recreated logging camp.  We learned so much about logging.  There were so many things to experience that I had not even considered part of the logging life, like how saws were sharpened and how they worked, and how logging men were not so excited about Theodore Roosevelt and his conservation ideas.  It was fun to visit the cookhouse.  The cook really had some personality!  She was a hoot, and we enjoyed learning about how she cooked and how she ran her dining hall.  I was surprised how IMPORTANT the cook was . . . the second highest paid person in the camp because her food recruited all the loggers.  It was also interesting to learn about how the trails were iced and how the logs were transported via horse down to the river.

Two of the kidlets were very happy to take a turn at the saw.

Mr. Sneaky Pants was so enamored with the saw that the managed to somehow sneak in an extra turn pulling it back and forth.  He does love sharp, dangerous objects that cut wood, you know.

After visiting the historical area, we walked over to the fire tower from the 1930’s, and climbed to the top to check out the view.  It was 100 feet tall, or approximately 10 stories high, and that seemed fine. In fact, going up was no problem for me at all.  But coming down!  Oh my!  I think I might have been tensing my leg muscles weird because I was cautions about being so high off the ground, but let me tell you, my muscles did not like the trip down.  By the bottom I was feeling  a bit like jello, and for the last two days I have not been able to walk DOWN anything (stairs, hills, whatever) without PAIN.  I have no trouble walking up hills or stairs or pushing a stroller uphill, but going down anything is excrutiating.  I’m trying to convince myself it’s because I tensed up weird and not because I’m disgustingly out of shape (I’ve been up and down steep hiking trails with almost as many stairs, though, and didn’t experience anything like this).  I guess I’m getting old.  Sigh.