___: Our Weekend

All week we have been looking forward to our campout with the Silvas. We went to Gannett Hill in Bristol, about an hour south of here. Although the boys were giving me a hard time and I was frustrated and not really feeling in the mood to go camping with all the kids by Friday night, I’m glad we went. That evening was nice – we were in a nice little camping spot up on a hill where the clouds were down all around us. The kids played a bit on a nearby playground and we had s’mores and hot chocolate before they all went to bed, quite easily, in the tent. I had found a couple more sleeping bags at a garage sale, and we unzipped those and then sipped the two bags together so they made one extra wide sleeping bag. We ended up letting Eli, Isaac, and Kolby sleep in there, and Camden was in another bag, and the baby slept in his car seat in the tent. After they went to bed, we stayed up and sat around the fire talking with Mike and Danielle until Michael fell asleep in his camp chair and we all went to bed not long after that. Isaac has had a stuffy nose and had a difficult night, and Eli kept waking up too, until we finally moved him into my sleeping bag with me and then we were able to get some sleep that night.

The next morning it was a little drizzly, and we set out to make breakfast. We made a few pancakes, and then decided to start up some scrambled eggs before making some more pancakes and the bacon. Well, to make a long story short the eggs didn’t cook well on the camp stove for some reason and I ended up holding the frying pan over the open fire as Mike tried to gather sticks, since we hadn’t planned on using the fire for breakfast and hadn’t brought more wood. It started raining pretty hard, and we probably looked pretty funny – all running around in the rain trying to get kids into the vans, take down tents, cook eggs over the fire in the rain, clean up pancake batter that never got cooked, and get everything put away. We finally got everyone into the cars, all quite wet, and we were trying to decide whether to call it a trip and head home, or to drive down to the nearby town and see if it was raining down there. We decided to follow the Silvas down to town and see how it looked and then decide.

We drove through the town of Naples and went to a little place that someone had told the Silvas about called Grimes Glen. There was a trail that went along a river, and we started hiking along it. We thought about getting out swimsuits, but I said we should just wear our clothes and expect the kids to get wet, and then change them later – it wasn’t warm enough for swimsuits. We were so glad we went – it turned out to be a wonderful hike! It was a beautiful river with little cascades all along it, and it wasn’t more than a few feet deep in most spots, so we didn’t worry too much about the kids getting washed away from us. About half way up we came across this really tall waterfall, which we thought was cool. Kolby and Eli had fun getting wet, and by that point we weren’t really trying to keep them dry at all anymore. From there we kept walking upstream, Kolby and Eli just walking straight up the river through the water, and Camden walking along after them. Isaac wanted to walk on his own, without holding our hands, for most of the way. And Courtland really enjoyed being carried in the Baby Bjorn and getting to watch the scenery.

When we got up to the second waterfall, it was even better than the first one. It had a pool at the bottom that was probably about 4 or 5 feet deep, and there was a little cave in the rock at one side that we waded over to. There is an area where you can climb up next to the waterfall with some ropes, but after getting about 2/3 of the way up, I decided to come back down because if I started to climb up higher on the ricks I probably would have had a hard time getting back down in all the slippery mud. Michael took each of the three oldest boys out into the water (all fully clothed) at the base of the waterfall, and he ended up going in up to his neck – he said he was numb for several hours afterwards. Kolby caught a really cool-looking little orange salamander too. It was a really great hike, and we were all glad we hadn’t just gone home. (We’ll definitely have to go back sometime, since it would be the perfect place to carry in a picnic lunch and spend an entire day on a nice hot summer day). After spending all that time in the water, the kids were tired and Eli was quite cold. On the walk back, Isaac fell asleep in Michael’s arms and Courtland fell asleep in the baby carrier with me. Just about the time we got back to the vans it started to rain again, and we decided not to eat at the picnic benches, but to change the kids into dry clothes and make lunches to eat in the cars. That turned out to be a wise decision because we ended up in quite the little downpour. We enjoyed some nice sandwiches that Danielle made while we drove out past one of the Finger Lakes and then headed home. So, even with all the rain, it turned out to be a nice trip and we’ll definitely have to go back.