We are just getting over jet lag incurred from the 13-hour time difference between east coast USA and Japan. It took me a full week to start sleeping my regular 8 hours. My family is enjoying being back in Pennsylvania again after last summer spent in Bolivia. Nadia and I run in the mornings and she is shown in the photo in Monocacy park, named after the creek which runs into the Lehigh river. I really feel the relative emptiness of America compared to densely populated Japan. It is so nice to have open spaces and lots of green lawns.
The Lehigh Valley cities of Easton, Allentown and Bethlehem have so much to offer for children and adults. We enrolled the children in a couple of sports camps. This past Saturday they went to a “speed and explosion” camp offered by the sports training staff of Muhlenberg College, a small, private (Lutheran), liberal arts school in Allentown. For an NCAA division III school, they have beautiful sports facilities! The kids did flexibility, agility and strength training exercises and learned about nutrition and wellness. Owen loves cross-fit so he was in his element in the weight room. Ocean and Oliver were quite sore the next day. I did a few of the excercises and mental note, 49-year old men should not be doing what 12-17 year olds are doing. The lunges almost killed me! Perhaps a “flexibility and maintenance” camp would have been better than “speed and explosion”. 🙂
This week the kids are at De Sales University in Center Valley, just south of Bethlehem. Owen is doing a hitting/defense baseball clinic and Oliver/Ocean are doing soccer. I’ll report on this later in the week. To wrap up this post, I noticed this monument to the steel industry located near the river on the south side of Bethlehem. Bethlehem Steel was the second largest steel company in the world and their mark is all over the city. I’ll be posting more about the history of the area, but hard to believe that for so many years the company was an economic juggernaut in Pennsylvania and the world and now is gone.
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