Southeast Tour 06/2010

Day 7, Wednesday 6/23/2010

I got up and took a walk outside, and as I was standing by the stream, it occurred to me it didn't babble enough.  So, my first activity was to rearrange the rocks and get some babbling going... Here's the pre babble photo; some ripples but not much noise...

Think of it as a water Zen garden... and I set about the business as my daughters laughed at me...

Doing that was actually quite interesting... the rocks had to stick out of the water just right to get turbulent flow around them to make noise...  My daughter decided to wade in with me while my other daughter took a video... and here we have the much improved babbling version of the stream...

And here's an artsy.. slow shutter speed version... visually, and acoustically, it was very soothing...

So, after rearrangement of the stream, and a great breakfast, we went to the local park/forest to do some hiking... and boulder climbing...

... and boulder skipping...

What can I say, it was a blast...

Then we ran into this critter... a copperhead... we probably should not have gotten that close... yes, they are poisonous and he didn't look very friendly... We eventually shoo'd him off with a long stick...

We stopped several times along the stream to go wading... Had to be careful, cause some of the rocks were slippery...

At one point I looked behind me, and those big rocks, and saw what looked to be a deep area in the stream, we went to look and sure enough, at it's deepest point it was a good five feet deep.

My older daughter was the first one to try the water...

And it wasn't long before everyone joined the party...

This is a funny looking photo... we're both jumping off rocks, but mine is just under the water surface, so seems like I'm hovering over the water...  We spent quite a bit of time at that spot, and my daughter spent most of that time jumping off one of those two rocks... yeah, now she was having fun. 

Random photo by daughter...

After we were all thoroughly swum out, and cold, we just basked on the rocks and dried out before continuing our hike...

We got back to the house where my daughter prepared another great meal, after which we went to the local multi-service station for some ice cream.  Nathan was having some trouble with his van... it had somehow managed to loss two quarts of oil; sine sort of leak while the engine was running.  We put some oil in it, and got our selves home from the ice cream shop.

Fooooooooooood person thingie... yeah, that's random...