So I have been to lazy to post anything. Giving in to pressure from those around me, I am going to post something. Actually, I have a lot to post. I have been hiking with my wife and kids over the 4th of July, then I went and almost finished the Pine Mountain Trail (I lack just under two miles...grrrrrr! Three hour drive for two miles!). And finally, over fall break I attempted to hike from Neels Gap to Amicalola State Park.
Well, I'll start with the 4th of July trip. We went to FDR State Park and camped for three nights. Took the wife and kids and had a great time. We got there on the fourth and went into Callaway Gardens for the fire works. We spent a couple of hours going through the butterfly atrium. We had a lot of fun. Turns out butterflies are attracted to red, the color of shirt that all four of us were wearing! We had them following us around the enclosure. It was actually a lot of fun. The kids loved having them land on them! That night we watched the fire works from the lake, after spending an hour in the van because of a massive lightining storm. True to form and the past three fire works displays that we have watched, my son was soon fast asleep during the ENTIRE show!
The next day we did some hiking around the area on some of the trails in the campground. They had a puppet show and "survival" demonstration...one of those in-case-you-left-your-ipod-and-have-no-cell-coverage survival demonstrations. We left from there and drove to Columbus to find a Wal-Mart (no vacation would be complete without the mandatory offering/mad scramble to the local Big Box Mart- see jibjab.com for a complete understanding of this).
From here we decided to take the short hour and a half drive to Providence Canyon where we raced another late summer afternoon thunderstorm to the bottom of a slot canyon, throwing all flash flood caution to the wind (disclaimer: while lots of fun, at least until your daughter starts screaming because of the lightining, I DO NOT recommend this approach to slot canyons). We had lots of fun and mud!
Our last day was spent sitting around and doing nothing, and cleaning up the campground. Overall, it was a fun trip.
Splinter
