The kids piano lessons were moved to an earlier time for the summer. Along with that she changed several of the dates because she was travelling. Well, I got one of the dates wrong and we showed up a day early. Will went barging into the house and they were sitting there looking stunned. We laughed and I felt terrible. We had already planned on going swimming afterwards, so we headed to the pool and had to wait for it to open.
The funny thing about this photo is Will is under Amy.
Tyler bounces a little too much around the pool and the bottom of it scrapes his toes a little. He always walks out like his legs are broken. Will offered to help him this time. It was a cute brotherly moment. Until Tyler pushed him off saying he could do it by himself. It takes a LONG time to get to the car with Tyler walking so slow.
We got tired of moving at a snails pace, so we had Tyler get on the rolling cooler and Amy wheeled him the rest of the way there. Genius. And it didn't break the cooler, which I was afraid of.
(You can see Will carrying Tyler's bag for him, which was really nice. This year I've made them all carry all their own stuff. It's been fabulous!)
A small harvest from the garden. The last kohlrabi and some green beans. The kids pick the beans off at random and eat them right away so it's hard to tell how many we've actually gotten.
One day they were doing this on the front porch. Reminds me of when my siblings and I used to do it.
National Donut Day! We headed to our newly opened Krispy Kreme for our free donut. The line was out the wazoo, but we made it :)
And the hike. I went on another hike with my group on Saturday. This time we re-tackled the Fiery Gizzard. We did this hike back in November but we took the upper loop. This time we wanted to try the lower loop. It was 13 miles of well, lets just say the "strenuous, treacherous and hard" description was completely accurate.
Pretty quickly we got rained on. Well, monsooned on was more like it. The canopy of the trees made it seem more like a hard rain. We had all brought ponchos, but soon it was too hot in them and we were soaked anyway so we abandoned them and just got wet.
Can't see the trail? It's the rocks. Anywhere we went, the rocks were the trail.
(I'm the one with the yellow pack)
The trail took us behind this water fall.
Again, a rock trail.
And yet again. A good portion of the trail was rocks. One reviewer called the trail a "moderate hike made difficult by the satanic amount of rocks." I burst out laughing because it was so true. The rocks weren't steady rocks either. They wobbled and were slick from the rain. You had to cross them very slowly and about half way through we were over it. But this is a one way trail, so unless you wanted to sleep on them, you had to keep going.
This bridge was a nice relief from the rocks.
I love seeing how trees grow out of the craziest places.
Ten hours later (yes TEN) we were done. The last time (the upper loop) took us 12 hours but we had a gal who was in a lot of pain that trip. I think we can do that a lot faster. We were making great time with the lower loop until we hit the miles and miles of rocks. We have all decided we will never do the lower loop again. It just isn't worth it. It's beautiful, but because its so treacherous, you have to focus on your feet and can't really enjoy the beauty around you.
Looking back, I'm actually glad it rained the entire time. Yes, we were soaked for 9 of the 10 hours and walking in soggy shoes isn't ideal. But in retrospect it kept the bugs, ticks and creatures (aka snakes) away, it's wasn't hot, and was a nice relief from what could have been a lot of misery. This trail was hard, but I was never miserable. I was glad to be done though, that's for sure! This is our ending photo and in some ways we look the same as the start photo. I don't know how that's possible because we were wringing out our tshirts and swishing as we walked. We were sore and hurting. Some had blisters (I did not) and others had bruises and scrapes. I took a bad sliding fall off a rock but luckily didn't injure anything. In fact, as much as people were falling, no one was injured more than a few bruises. We were sweaty and dirty. But we were all smiles. I guess that's the important part! We did have fun and woke up this morning with a true sense of accomplishment! I love these friends of mine who make me do hard things. (I got in 33,000 steps, I guess that's quite an accomplishment!)
Link to the youtbue video is: https://youtu.be/VyXZbX5uJFQ
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