Buster and the boys were chomping at the bit to get going!
I knew this was going to be a nice hike from the very beginning.
My heart sang! Oh how I have missed being out among trees, with a gurgling creek rushing by! Way back when, Paul and I used to hike. We spent many a lovely day exploring new trails. Since the boys have come along we've just never really gotten back to it. It seems like we've been waiting a lot of years for them all to be old enough to walk long distances.
And now they finally are! We did discover on this hike that Rowan has a little bit of an issue with heights. He kept saying he was scared of the drop off, (even if it was only 4-5 feet) and insisted on holding my hand and walking on the inside the entire way. He really didn't want to be in this picture since right behind him is about a 4 foot drop to the creek.
But then we reached this stone house, and he got excited.
Grayson thought maybe it was an old jail.
But he wasn't too disappointed when we told him it was used as a resting point, and used to have bathrooms in it.
It was still fun to make believe all of the exciting things that old stone building could have been.
We walked on and on through the beautiful trees. The original route we had planned on hiking today was about 4 1/2 miles, but we ended up taking a detour and only doing about half of it. Rowan's legs were tired, and he said he wasn't having any fun because it was too scary.
Our route back to where we had parked took us past some amazing old homes. I just marvel at the beauty of the architecture, and of course have great envy of the people who live in them. On the way back we also went across the bridge above where we started.
And right then we made doing more outings like this a part of our plan for the year ahead.
