Rotary Park

I posted one shot from this trip last week, but brace yourselves because I have a whole lot more. Since it's fall, I've been embracing my camera a bit more lately. Apologizing in advance for all non-family members.

We took the short trail a couple of weeks ago and so planned in advance to take a longer one. The "longer" one did not turn out to be quite as long as we thought so we chose the unmarked trail. Brian's idea, of course.

Off we go.

Then we spied this. The sound of the stream was so pretty!

Thank you, Camden, for the picture.

After seeing a few other families playing in the stream, we decided to throw caution to the wind and let the kids play in the water. You should know that I am not really a throw-caution-to-the-wind kind of person. 

As evidenced by the fact that I consider letting the kids play in water on a fall day as a throw-caution-to-the-wind kind of event.

Camden grabbed Rory's hand (probably to save himself more than help her out) and they headed out.

Then they decided to all hang on for dear life because, turns out, those rocks were slick!

If you only knew how much Brian hates cold water. This is good parenting right here. Notice I am not in the water.

She fell in. Twice. She kinda has a reputation for this sort of thing.

Hang on for a second while I get the artistic photos out of my system.

Yep, I'm just hanging out with my shoes on.

Camden is becoming very interested in photography and he totally spotted this little "hole" in the trail and wanted to take Rory's picture here.

Rory thinks she took this one.

What a 10-year old does when you ask him to pose.

Photobombed.

Okay, another artistic one. Completely copied this idea of focusing on the trail from the Clickin Moms blog.

Notice what Camden is doing in this picture . . .

. . . and now Rory. Because she MUST do whatever he does.

It was about this time we realized we had no idea where we were. The little white spot in this picture is us looking down on the sun glinting off our van. And no clue how to really get back.

There are all kinds of little bridges and ramps that are there for mountain bikers.

The trail came out a very long way from our van so we decided to backtrack.

I put away the camera, which means I barely had time to whip it out when Camden ran up the ramp to help out Rory when she started crying.

Laughing in relief.

For a non-nature lover, this was a pretty fun fall afternoon. I doubt I'd have been as excited about being lost if it were say, summer and 95 degrees. But I can totally take being lost on a cool fall day.