Letterboxing Rocks

You tired of hearing about our letterboxing exploits yet? You know, I wouldn't keep writing about it if we weren't having such a grand time! And this weekend, we had a particularly long and rather cold outing to a really neat place, so it seemed like it deserved mention, even if I left the letterboxing out of it entirely.

Late morning yesterday, I packed the kids in the van for a trip to Castle Rock State Park. Daddy ended up joining us at the last minute, so that was a bonus. I packed a few snacks and extra sweaters for the kids. Good thing too. It was COLD up there! Daddy, naturally, brought no sweater and had to put up with wearing my long, flowing cardigan for much of the trip. I have no pictures. You'll have to envision that for yourself.

The best part of Castle Rock, as you might expect, are the rocks! They're huge and riddled with holes and caves. We probably could have (and maybe should have) spent our entire time climbing around on the rocks and hanging out in little caves.
But it was cold up by the park's namesake rock. We found one letterbox up there with a disappointingly lame stamp that we added to our logbook. And I ran around like an idiot trying to find another one. I never found it. The first part of the clue was to "Find David's Trees". I didn't find them either. We decided to head back to the parking lot and potentially take another trail.

Naturally, we saw "David's Trees" on the way back, right next to the parking lot. Ugh. Turned out to be a pretty easy box to find.

Leaving my flowing sweater and our better judgement behind in the parking lot, we headed down a new trail to find the third and last of the boxes up there. It was much warmer, thankfully. And it was beautiful.
Of course, it turned out to be a monumental hike to the last box. It was fun, but challenging, with a lot of lifting the kids over stuff. We found it and immediately headed back. The kids were getting whiney. Daddy carried one kid on his shoulders much of the time.
As a quick detour on our way back, we went to see the waterfall. It's hardly spectacular compared to say, Yosemite, but it's pretty tall and the view downward is completely dizzying. I had a strong urge to hold onto the kids very tightly. And I took Mam's glasses off for fear they'd go over the edge.
You can't even see the depths of the waterfall in this picture, so you'll have to take my word for it.
From the waterfall, we zoomed back to the parking lot as fast as we could muster. Everyone was tired and everyone had tired legs, although you might've though Mam would never make it judging by all the complaining. She did though. Both the kids did great. And maybe Daddy did best of all, since he ended up carrying the weight of a child much of the time.

I always thought this was the kind of parent I'd be...regularly getting the kids out to learn about nature and get a little exercise. Why did it take me so long to get here? I think this was one of my favorite family days out ever!