On April Fools Day, we headed out for a day of hiking and banging on rocks.

Really.

There is a boulder field about 40 minutes away from us called Ringing Rocks Park. Many years ago, someone discovered that these rocks have a special property – if you bang on them with a hammer or another rock, they don’t sound like rocks. They sound like pipes. What’s even cooler is that nobody is exactly sure why this particular boulder field works this way. Not every rock in the field is capable of ringing – only about a third of them, apparently, can perform. And when scientists have removed those rocks from the field for analysis, they lose their ability to ring.

Spooky!

We set out in the trusty minivan and had a picnic lunch at the park:

Then it was time to get out there:

We banged on the rocks for a while, then chased each other around the boulder field. The weather was warm and sunny, and we had the place virtually to ourselves.

Tomorrow: Ralph Stover. (A park, not a person. Well, I guess he was a person at some point. But he’s a park now.)

Somebody in our house – I’m not naming names – turned 13 last week, meaning that your faithful correspondent is now the parent of a teenager.

Wow. I feel older just writing that.

Birthday boy decided to celebrate with cake and dinner at Jason’s Deli, a restaurant around the corner from us.

Here’s the (not yet) hulking teenager and his proud parents:

He took photos with a few other characters, too:

Then it was time to open a few gifts:

A good time was had by all.

This was the start of my spring break, and it was more like the middle of the kids’ break – they had started their break the prior Thursday, and only went back to school this morning.

Before dinner, we had gone to play laser tag – Nick, the girls, and I had gone. We don’t have any pictures, but we had a pretty good time. It was Anna’s first time playing, and it turned out that her relatively small size was an advantage. She could duck behind things to avoid being tagged.

Tomorrow: Ringing Rocks!