I managed to throw together a quick screen door this week and get some other things in order before I went on a trip with the 6th grade class as a chaperon, to the Environmental Learning Center in Finland, (Minnesota).
Here’s the screen door. I have to build a lot of these since decent wood screen doors are just so hard to come by:

The 6th grade trip to the ELC has been something they have been doing in our school for many years. I last went with one of my other son’s class about nine years ago. This will most likely be my last time going, since I don’t anticipate having any more children. The ELC trip is pretty fun once you get past all the “sharing” and “touchy/feely” stuff the instructors are forced to throw in there just to kill time I think. My son’s reaction this time to all of it was the same as my other son last time I went. He just thought, for all the talk about how fun it is, for the most part, it was pretty boring and he could have been using his time more productively doing something else, (in this case, playing baseball…).
But here are always the highlights. The rock climbing is the big one. They have a couple great inside rock climbing walls and the kids really like this. I enjoyed it too, but only climbed one section:

But mostly I just liked the hiking. There were some beautiful over-looks with views of Lake Superior in the distance, and because we were so close to the North Shore, the bugs were minimal. The weather was perfect. It was a good trip. We had some great instructors.