Luke and I had a little photo shoot with this cool spider on our front porch.

Camping day 3

The boys took a few last minutes to play in the river

and one last potty stop at what they named as "pee platform" (sorry if this offends you don't read on) then we packed up to get ready to come home.

On the way out of the Lost River Valley Campground, Mike reached his hand out the window and somehow caught this butterfly. How random is that?

We took a drive on the Kancamangus highway and checked out the beautiful scenery.

Josh the jumper would challenge himself with a jump at every stop we made. This particular stop he felt like his challenge was a little more then he could do, but Mike was pretty awesome at helping him believe he could jump from one taller then normal pole and spread farther apart then normal to the next tall pole.

 

Mission accomplished.

The jump was a success.

No bones were broken in the completion of this jump.

 

The wildflowers were everywhere. I loved them.

Last stop for us on the highway was Sabbaday Falls.

We laugh at this picture of Ben and his random head pose.

To go to the top of the waterfall we had to hike up a series of steps and across some bridges. At the top bridge Ben had the bright idea to pee off the top. Boys can't pee in nature alone so Josh joined in.
They waited until there wasn't anyone around and then had their moment of glory...that of course I felt necessary to document.

Look at the looks of joy on their face.

 

One more stop before home was at Cranmore resort to ride a mountain coaster.

 

Ben and Luke rode on a zip line

I told them to give me their best crazy face. Luke gets an A for effort.

A picture of tongues

It was a good weekend and a needed break. As we were heading home and driving back into the land of cell phone reception we realized that my family, meaning both my brothers, their wives, and all 6 of their kids under the age of 5 and my dad had decided to come and visit for the 4th of July. They were going to be arriving just 3 days after we were going to be getting home from our campout.......and the adventure continues.

Camping day 2

 Oh what a beautiful morning.
A beautiful view, a beautiful guy cooking a beautiful breakfast.

 After breakfast these guys went out to man rock. They tried to get Jake to come with them but the river was still to raging for him and crossing the rocks in the river scares him so they started the party without him.

 

 But Jakes desire to not disappoint is strong. Surprise! He made it. I love the look on their faces.

After breakfast and our visit to man rock we went for a hike. 

This wasn't just an ordinary hike which is more what we were expecting, it was a beautiful but hard hike!

 We hiked all along a river, and through the river several times. The hike had several waterfalls as well. I'm a sucker for a beautiful waterfall and this hike had so many it made all of the sweat worth it.

 Last summer we hiked a mountain in Idaho. That hike was 14 miles round trip and at a much higher elevation. We hiked about 7 miles on this hike and the mountains here don't even compare to the mountains in the west so we figured this would be a piece of cake. We were wrong!

This hike was just as tough if not more challenging then hiking the Idaho mountain. The  Idaho mountain had a trail of dirt with some rocks, this mountain had nothing but rocks with maybe a little dirt on the side. The smooth rocks were covered in water so they were slick which created it's own challenges. Here are some pictures of our trail.

There wasn't anything flat about it. It felt like we had just hiked up a million stairs.

 Sorry for the picture overload, but it was a beautiful, fun, tough day. Sad to say we didn't make it to the top. Once we hiked past the waterfalls the scenery changed to being more enclosed among the trees, it was getting late in the afternoon and being in the trees like that made it seem darker then it was. We hiked on for another couple of miles but everyone was getting exhausted climbing the rocks. We were taking a break trying to decide weather to complete the loop (which includes the top of the mountain) or turn back. Some hikers passed us and said it would be another 3 hours to the top.

That settled that. We turned back and headed for ice cream.

I have a hard time not finishing what I start so that was a hard choice for me to turn back, but I don't think any of us had enough energy left nor did we have enough daylight to complete that hike.

Ice cream was a must and so was dinner.

Josh enjoyed his dinner on man rock

After dinner the boys went back to the river to play