As you probably have already read, last weekend I spent on the battleship USS Massachusetts, at Battleship Cove. My family went down with a bunch of great homeschool friends of ours: Mr. Estes, Nick, Joel, Kenan, Linnea, Catherine, Mr. Richards, Mrs. Richards, Tucker, Rebecca, and Colin. The people form my family that came were Shannon, Dad, Colleen and I.

First off, we had a couple hours of driving Saturday morning to get to Battleship Cove. It was a long, but very enjoyable ride. We talked, played games on iPhones, and ate snacks. By the time we got to Battleship Cove it was almost 1:00pm. It took a few minutes to sign in, but once we finished we headed to our bunks and and unloaded our sleeping stuff and bags. After unloading we split up and explored the other ships at the in the Cove because they were going to close those ships after the fire drill at 4:30pm. The other ships there besides the American battleship were an American Destroyer, an American Submarine, and a Russian missile cruise ship. I pretty much hung out with the guys when exploring and reading, and occasionally with the girls. We spent a couple hours exploring the smaller ships and went back to the battleship for the fire drill.

When we were finished with the fire drill I went exploring with different guys throughout the hour or so we had until supper. One of the coolest things to explore were the 16 inch turrets. They we about 5 levels deep and required 79 men to operate! They could also fire their shells (which weighed hundreds of pounds) 20 miles.

Well, I could continue writing everything I did, but I'll just skip to the more notable parts so I don't spend hours writing this...
Well, one of the big things was the 9/11 memorial service. I was pretty impressed by that, but sadly we got there a little late and couldn't  see much of what was happening. I think the most impressive thing they did was have a 21 shot salute one of the twin 5 inch turrets. The sound was almost deafening, even though I was pretty far away... and they were only using 1/15 the powder they use in battle. That was epic.

Here is a picture my twin Colleen took when they were firing:

Another notable thing was just the pure size of the battle ship! Sometimes when I was with some of the guys we would get lost. It wasn't too hard to find my way back, but it was still pretty funny. Also one time I found Rebecca who hadn't explored the battleship as much as me asking me to to show her to the nearest stair way (more like a latter) so she could find out where she was. Just on a side note, only 30% of the battleship was open to public. Yeah. It was huge.

Around 3:00pm on Sunday we had to leave to head home. On the way we visited a Deerwander family (the Vandykes) that we knew! Turned out they had a youth group that night and a bunch of other Deerwander kids ended up coming and seeing us! We played a short game of Ultimate, talked, ate a grand supper, gave hugs and left for Maine.

On the ride back we all became pretty tired and goofy and made said all kinds of... how should I put it? Dumb things. I'd try explaining them, but they'd make no sense to you.