So that first Fourth of July post, that covered the day up until about 11 am. From there we headed home and after some clothes changing (my shirt was kind of sweaty and Catherine had gotten popsicle juice all over her shirt) we headed out to Frying Pan Park. Now the kids have been here before (Catherine a couple of times and Quinn at least once), but this was my first time there and since Ginger's brother Uncle JJ is visiting, it was his first time there also.
It's a neat park with lots of interactive stuff and animals that the kids can see. No real surprise, they weren't running the wagon rides today. I was kind of surprised the park was even open to be honest. But the good news is for a weekend I did not think there was a very big crowd at the park at all (probably has to do with everyone thinking it wouldn't be open since it's a holiday).
It's a pretty big park. We eventually ended up around back where the horse riding area is watching some people ride horses and doing some jumps. The kids meanwhile had the best time just climbing on the rocks. It's always amazing to me to see what's going to grab their attention. All this stuff there and jumping around on rocks pretending the ground is lava is what they end up doing.
After a brief snack, Quinn decided we needed to visit the waterfall. Now I've never been there, so I know nothing about this waterfall. And Ginger mentioned that the map for the nature hike was available at the park's store (which we had not been to so we didn't have the map). But Quinn, who heard about this 'huge' waterfall from the guy that was giving the tractor rides last time he was there was convinced we could find it. So I played along. All of this was much to Ginger's dismay since at this point I think she was ready to head home and get the kids some lunch and had been verballing 'hinting' to me that we wouldn't be able to find it and that we should wait until another day. I would have none of that though and feigned ignorance at the verbal hints (the reason Ginger believed that is due to how often I don't pick up on verbal hints normally).
So off we went, walking around the edge of the park until we came upon "Nature Trail 1". There's more than 1 trail? What could go wrong? So off we went down trail 1. This plan lasted all of five minutes until we hit the first branch in the trail. We took the one less traveled and ended up at a dead end after another couple of minutes. Then it was backtracking time. This happened about two or three more times until finally we hit one that diverged and I went one way and the rest of them went the other. Luckily I came across a stream and was able to call everyone back over. If I'm going to be honest about all this, I had an absolute blast walking around through the woods. Even when we would end up going down the wrong trail, to me walking through the woods is just fun (and for the most part I think the kids agree). And not knowing where we were going made it even more entertaining. Although as I pointed out to Ginger, it's not like we could have gotten lost, I mean how large of an area of undeveloped land can there really be around this area?
I found a little tiny place where the water dropped about six inches and claimed that we found the waterfall. No one believed me and then Ginger called us downstream a bit to where we located what I believe is the real waterfall. It's only about a six foot drop, but for the middle of Northern VA, I would say that's pretty impressive.
Having now declared victory in finding the waterfall, we headed back, but I foolishly decided to take a path on the other side of the stream and we ended up at some bridge crossing some road we had never seen before. So then it was time to backtrack some more back to the stream and take the path we came in on, but even then I decided to keep going the way we had been heading originally rather than backtrack (and I still can't believe Ginger went along with this idea given how we ended up at the bridge after my last directional decision), but luckily we ended up on a horse trail that ended up being a great shortcut back to the park.
Surprisingly I didn't take as many non people photos as I would have expected. in fact, the pickings are pretty slim looking over the shots I took. The one above is one of the better ones, which isn't saying a lot about the ones I'm not going to show.
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