A Hiking We Will Go

Last night after dinner we decided to take a hike.

There are some hiking trails down the street from our house, which we haven't explored before.

We decided it was a good time to try them out because it was rather cool out and we thought it

might help wear the boys out for bed time.  I also wanted to challenge my photography skills and

only shoot in manual mode.  I usually shoot in manual for landscape, but not for the kids on our

adventures (that is what they call our outings). 

I added the red to the map above so you can see where we should have hiked.

The map says it is an easy 1.2 mile trail through the center of the park.  I know the boys

could easily handle that distance.  However we found out we are not very good map readers. 

We started our walk around 6:30 pm.

The boys were so excited and pointed out every mushroom, creepy crawly and tree that fell down.

Brady insisted this red mushroom was from "Alice in Wonderland".

For some reason I thought this tree was pretty cool.

I did a little photoshop edit on it.

Throughout the trail there are 20 fit stations (a total of 32 exercise workouts). The boys stopped at all of them and tried them out.  Some stations only had a picture of a stretch and Tiny instead it meant

it was for kids to dance. So they would have a little dance party, then quickly move on down the trail to the next fit station.

Tiny insisted this was the slide exercise.

I was pretty proud of my shooting skills in manual thus far.  Typically I give up after a few shots and switch back to AV mode.  I love the bokeh (blurry out of focus background area) in the below shot.

Doesn't that tree limb look like a lizard!

It started getting darker and Freddy and I knew we better find our way back to the parking lot, but the more we tried to figure out what path to take we seemed to be going in circles.

The boys were blissfully unaware that we couldn't figure out where we were going.

They were still excited about every mushroom and fit station.  We knew we had traveled way more than 1.2 miles and it was approaching 8:00 pm.

It was getting darker and we just seemed to be getting more lost.  Ugg. 

Freddy told the boys "Mommy thinks she is in the Hunger Games." 

I said I almost wish we were and there were flames forcing us to go in the right direction.

As it got darker I kept thinking to myself the park ranger has to come looking for us. Doesn't he?

Our car was still parked in the parking lot, will anyone find us? 

We kept walking and the boys were great sports.

But finally we found the big field with the grass!

We did it!  I added the blue lines to show what our actual path was.

Keep in mind the red line is 1.2 miles. We had to have walked around 8 miles. So much for our

expert hiking skills.  The map is deceiving because the paths are not all the same level.  We got so close to our car, but there is a river that cut us off so we had to go all the way around. Also we made the mistake of asking someone for help and they sent us the wrong way.

When we pulled up to our house I can't tell you how happy I was to be home.

We will definately go back to these trail, just next time we'll stick to the correct trail.