Hi everyone! Thanks for coming to check out our blog.
Since this is the first official blog posting I suppose I should give you a little background. If you haven't already guessed, this is Emily. I'll most likely be the one posting-at least here at the beginning. Starting a blog was my brilliant idea as a way to share pictures and stories of our lives with all of you. I'm completely new at this so we'll see how it all works out.
If you're here on this site you already know quite a bit about us. The 5 of us (and our two cats) live in the house we've owned for over 20 years. We're 5 people with 5 hectic schedules. Mom is our household organizer and she keeps our colored coding calendar always up to date. Soccer season (for Olivia and Grant) just ended so we now in the midst of the winter season (basketball for G and Nutcracker for Liv).
It's rare when we have a chunk of time to all spend together so a few weekends ago we took advantage of a Sunday and took a little trip to the Chimney Bluffs up in Huron.
Last spring Mom signed the family up for a program called "Trails of Wayne County" (check out the link...ooh look at me inserting links in our first post! Fancy!)
http://www.trailworks.org/ There are 16 total trails around Wayne County and our family goal is to complete all 16. This was only number 6. Olivia has been our resident photographer for all of our Trail Adventures. We thought we would make a scrap book but here's our online scrap book instead!
Sit back, get comfortable this story could take awhile and I'm known for being long winded!
As I mentioned above, a few Sundays ago we realized it's the first Saturday or Sunday since the spring that none of us have had plans. "Lets do a trail!" was the general consent of the family after church. One problem. Our DVR. We are a DVR obsessed family. We rarely to never watch live tv. Every weekend we realize we're up to at least 90% and need to be down to about 70% in order to tape the next week's shows. So we settled in with our typical Sunday brunch...bagel sandwiches with egg, cheese and Virginia baked ham (shaved) served with Dad's famous breakfast potatoes and watched two episodes of Project Runway (and the Model show that comes on after). After TV time it's 3:30ish. Everyone changed into their sweats ("OLD clothes and shoes!!"-Mom) grabbed our little Trails of Wayne County
passports, water bottles and my GPS and hit the road.
We picked Trail number 5-
Chimney Bluffs State Park in Huron, NY. A beautiful geological landmark right in our backyard! It's always a bit of a challenge finding the actual starting place of the trails. Once we did and parked our car we set out on our way. We had two choices for our starting point, this was a looping trail-one part through the woods and one part across the beach. We decided to do the woods part first. We thought the beach would be a fun "prize" for finishing the tough part. Little did we know the beach would actually end up being the worst part of the journey!!
We began our trail here heading into the woods. We were off to a pretty typical start. Grant running ahead, me lagging behind, Dad finding a "walking stick" and Olivia taking pictures of herself-
We walked over logs (sometimes having to walk ON a slippery log covered in moss to make it through the muck), through the mud, under branches, up hill, down hill constantly following little yellow triangles on the trees marking the path. At each of the Wayne County Trails there is a marker ("No Mom, not a marker, we use a CRAYON"-Olivia-our family blonde) where there is a rubbing for our booklet to prove that we completed the trail. It's always a relief when we find the "rubbing station" because it means we went the right way in the woods. This station? Not easily found. It felt like we walked for miles looking (actual distance less than 1 mile). Luckily we passed beautiful sights of the bluffs-
After we finally found the station the trail was downhill from there...literally. The first tumble of the evening was by yours truly. A SUPER steep hill was the last obstacle before the beach entrance. Olivia and Grant, of course, took the hill at a running speed and got to the bottom in no time. Mom, Dad and I were barely making it down...stumbling from tree to tree. With Dad's "walking stick" broken in half the 3 of us had little to rely on. I knew it was coming, I felt the mud slipping and sliding at every step...BOOM down I went-sliding a bit for good measure. At last, all 5 of us we at the beach. By this point the sun was rapidly setting and while that does make for a beautiful picture-
it doesn't make for the best "trail walking".
We met another family on their way out and had them take the obligatory family pic-
Mom, now in frantic "squirrel mode" ("My head was so sweaty...like a squirrel when they get nervous"-Mom) because of the impending sunset and rising tide, scurried ahead with Grant in tow. According to Mom's memory, the rest of us were "poking" along. This is no ordinary beach. It's full of cobblestones, large pieces of drift wood and other various obstacles to climb over and under. It's not easy to navigate through. Throw in the tide coming in and lose of sunlight and there's the recipe for diaster.
Here's where the spills happen again. Olivia bites it on the stones after trying to take pictures on her cell phone (the camera battery died shortly after family photo op) and lands on her elbow. Dad stops to help. Mom and Grant are so far ahead they didn't see. Mom is too busy yelling "Come ON! HURRY!" As we make it to a giant drift wood which we have to duck under into a pit of mud/sand and climb out to the other side. Grant falls first and I make my second "graceful landing". Fall count: 4.
At this point it felt like we were characters in some kind of action adventure movie. There was hardly any light and the water coming up made it very difficult to jump over, under and around the rocks and drift wood. It was tough to hear Mom's yells over the crashing water and I could barely see Mom and Grant up ahead. Olivia caught up at this point and was now in between Mom/Grant and me. Behind was Dad. In his beacon of a white coat (see family pic for reference). I approached a piece of drift wood that was sticking out toward the water. After careful calculation and with the timing of someone who's played one too many games of Frogger, I was able to jump around the wood, missing the waves of water coming in and avoiding wet socks. Dad apparently saw me do this and thought he too could time the maneouver. He miscalculated.
"AHHHHH" I heard from behind me and saw Dad splayed out on the beach yelling as the water crashed up soaking more than just his socks. I yelled for Mom to come back ("MOMMMMM!"-Emily in her best horror movie scream) and ran to Dad-still flat on his back. He didn't see the branch, thought he was just avoiding the water (he took his glasses off not wanting them to fall off-in hindsight not the best plan) and slammed stomach first into the pointy drift wood causing him to fall backward-landing on his already hurt leg, ramming his forearm on the rocks and possibly breaking a finger (not verfied by a medical professional). Luckily, he wasn't seriously injured and was able to stand and hobble out of the beach. Grant and the Squirrel found the exit and yelled in jubilation!
The 5 of us had made it out of the trail in (mostly) one piece. Standing at our vehicle, Dad stripped down from all his soaking wet clothes and was standing in his boxer briefs when lo and behold headlights started our way. Of course, it was the NYS Park Police. The parks close at sun down and it was well past. Dad proceeded to have a conversation with the officer, explaining that we were on a family hike and got a bit lost and fell in the water. It was like we were auditioning for Wayne County COPS. Awesome.
It was great to finally get in the car and drive home to Newark. We spent the entire ride, debriefing the event (luckily Dad stayed "briefed" considering that was all he had on hee hee) and thought what an adventure we had.
We haven't had the chance to go on another trail yet but our goal is to finish all 16 by the March deadline.
We'll post more of our adventures on here soon!
Thanks for stopping by and we hope you visit often!
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