Hunting Weekend Hiking

The end of October flew by between our fall break and Halloween. Then just a few days after Halloween, Mike headed north for five days to meet up with his dad for hunting opener. His departure also aligned with a ramp up in the hockey schedule - 10 straight days of one (or both) Q and D having hockey commitments. 

Because Quinn and Dec had back-to-back practices both Saturday and Sunday, I knew that would mean Fiona had a lot of solo time. So I promised her that we would do something fun after hockey each day. Then we were blessed with the most wonderful weather for the weekend - so a couple hiking adventures were on the docket. 

Saturday, Bugs showed off her maturity as I left her in charge of feeding Declan lunch while I ran Quinn to practice. She did a great job (although there were comments about his Moral Compass behavior when I ran back to grab him for his own practice) and then had a second lunch to keep Quinn company when I traded hockey players. By the time everyone was home from the rink, they all needed a mid-afternoon snack. 

Finally, we were ready to bust Bugs out of the house. We decided to go down to O'Dowd Lake and look for our turtle friends. We struck out on the turtles, but found a great beach full of rocks. The kids spent an hour throwing rocks and floating sticks and leaves in the water. I'm not sure the folks at the fishing pier around the corner appreciated all our rock throwing ... but it was so much fun. We also couldn't believe how low the lake was - and instead of navigating across the rocks to the island, we simply walked across. No wet feet or anything! Perhaps that is why we couldn't find any turtles!

Because it was also Daylight Saving Time that weekend, hockey was earlier and we were able to start Sunday's hike earlier as well. We went to Spring Lake park and decided to follow the trail all the way down to the lake. It was about a 2 mile road trip route. There were plenty of stops along the way to climb trees, balance on fallen trunks, find walking sticks, and other such off-roading activities. I occasionally wondered if we would ever actually make it to the lake.

We did - but found that the rock throwing set up there was not as good as the day before. That said, there were a lot better skipping rocks and Dec showed off his skills. He even had one skipper that probably had seven skips! I lined the kids up to take a picture and commented on the sunset. Then I realized the sun was setting! The time change meant the the sun was going down around 5 pm. Yikes! We had not factored that into our plan. 

So I hustled everyone back toward the trail and tried to limit the off-roading slightly on the walk back. We didn't limit it completely - because my favorite part of the whole thing was all the giggling while we walked. We really did have the best time together! However, I was almost positive that I was going to have to pick our way back to the car in the pitch black if the snails pace continued.

[We also had the most random grocery experience over the weekend. I ordered our groceries to be delivered on Saturday evening. I got a notification on my phone that they were being shopped and that they were on the way. Then I got a survey about my experience. Except no groceries had arrived. I even sent the kids out on a scavenger hunt to see if they could find them. I reported the missing delivery and they rescheduled it for that night. It never came and I eventually rescheduled for Sunday morning. Then they unscheduled my reschedule. So I had to reschedule again, making the delivery very inconvenient with the hockey schedule. But eventually we got our food! And Q was at hockey with three minutes to spare ... until she decided to play goalie. But that's a story for a different post.]