Wild River State Park

Sunday afternoon we took advantage of the 80 degree day and drove a little outside of the cities for a state park hike. We had planned to pick up lunch and eat at the park, but I waited to long and there was really nothing around the park except two biker bars, so we stopped at the one that had more windows and had a quick lunch of chicken sandwiches and burgers. It was good and a fun experience for the kids. They had an appetizer of cherries, pickles, and saltines. Once we were no longer starving we made it over to the state park. The ladybugs were INSANE! Turns out they were actually asian lady beetles because they were biting... luckily they weren't bad on our hike, but back at the picnic area they were horrible. So in the end it worked out we didn't bring along food to eat at the park.

We made it down the big hill, just in time for Mary to take a big poop. Emma wanted nothing to do with walking so Kyle wore her the whole time. He was a gentle man and hoofed back up the hill to grab some diapers from the van while we stayed below and Isaac and Mary explored.


It was a gorgeous day with amazing colors!

We got Mary all cleaned up and went back down the second half of the hill while Kyle ran BACK up to throw the dirty diaper away. We made the quick .2 jaunt to the look out, but not before hearing about Isaac dying of thirst. Unfortunately we didn't bring the water and we weren't turning back for it so he just had to wait.


Ironically the benediction at church mentioned having a week filled with an abundance of God's grace, and for us it was starting early. The hiking club password happened to be at that lookout spot making us very lucky not having to take the longer hiking club trail to find it.  So instead of turning down where we thought we'd have to go to locate the password we were able to turn north and take a shorter route back to the parking lot. This was also encouraging to Isaac as he was SOOO parched and his legs were starting to hurt. Oh and at this point Kyle and I were both carrying the girls, Mary enjoyed walking but we actually wanted to walk so I wore her on my back.




Emma was so close to sleeping the entire time, but never quite got there.


Once we made it back to the van we grabbed everyone's water bottles and a snack and sat on the picnic tables for a snack as the lady beetles snacked on us.


I wanted to get a photo of all three of them, but Emma had no part in that


This is Mary's fake cry face:


All in all it was a great day and felt so good to be outdoors and hiking again. Kyle and I miss camping and all the time we used to spend outdoors. It's a little different now and we have to have little commentary to go along with it, but we plan to get back into camping next year when the girls will be a little easier to manage.