Thought for the Day: Before you criticize your children, just remember who raised them.


Woke up to a dreary day. Temperature 65 and drizzling. The kitchen staff was able to counter this situation with warm “milk soup” for breakfast. It looked and tasted something like Farina.

When the classes began, my group of nine children wanted to play scrabble and bingo. They also played charades, which we did by timing the two groups for competitive play.

The fourth period was dance, where Mira led her onstage team in Cotton Eye Joe. Most of the campers joined in on the main floor. This was followed by several other dance numbers with the finale being a rousing YMCA, with everyone joining in.

After lunch, the volunteers went in the van to the Open Air Museum. The estate consists of a 260 year main house, which has a slight odor of mold, several outlying houses, a barn and a second smaller manor house. The noble family Cieszkowski was the original owner and most recently it was purchased by Professor Kwiatkowski in 1987. The professor renovated the house and charges guests who want to visit. The house has old furniture and many oil paintings of portraits on the wall. He lives there in a side house. In one of the outlying houses that we went into, we saw huge boots used by the farmer in olden days, a toy wooden horse and a wooden crib. Kamila did a great job translating for us what the ticket collector/guide said in Polish.

Next we went to Castle Liw Armory built in 1429 by Prince Charming. It is now the Museum Zbrojownia na zamku w Liwie. Here the guide spoke very good English. He began the tour by showing us a full body armor suit which weighs 66 pounds. When someone was knocked off his horse, the suit weighed so much that he was unable to get up even if he wasn’t otherwise injured. The walls of each room had displays of rifles, swords, sabers, and of course oil paintings of battles. During World War II, when the Germans came to demolish the castle in order to use the bricks to build the concentration camp, Treblinka, Otto Warpechowski, an archeologist, persuaded them that the castle had been built by the Teutonic Knights Order. The Germans were fooled. Warpechowski died toward the end of World War II in an accident. Our guide told us that this weekend there will be the annual games of the battling of the Knights. Unfortunately, the family of five will be in Belarus visiting Grandpa’s birth place and Alice and Marianne will be visiting the Bialowieza National Park.