When Captain and I stayed at the yurt in Afton State Park this winter, we spent quite a bit of time chatting with the ranger in the office when we were checking out. I wandered around the little gift shop because I like to have a memento from each state park we stay in.
This time I didn't purchase a memento but the Minnesota State Park Hiking Club log book and the Minnesota State Park Passport log book. My theory was that the hiking club log book would provide me with dozens of trips with Cubby.
The object of the hiking club is to get people out exploring the state parks and the incentive to do so is a find and record a password that is posted at about the halfway point of the dedicated hiking club trail.
For our first foray into this adventure, I took Cubby with me back to Afton State Park because we needed to pick up the jacket that Captain left in the yurt when we stayed there. Cubby wasn't thrilled with it being a 90-minute drive so I bribed her with the promise of lunch at McDonalds on the way there and a stop at Thelma's Treats in Afton on the way home.
On the way to Afton, I really hyped up how much fun it was going to be to do a treasure hunt type search for the password, thinking there would be some sleuthing skill required. When we discovered that the password is plastered in great big letters on a sign that says PASSWORD, it was a little anticlimactic. Thus Cubby's crabby face.
Still, I convinced her it was still a fun activity and we kept on hiking. Lucky for me, we found a stream she could play in for a good 15 minutes!
Of course, when we finished the hike and were heading home, I took her to Thelma's Treats in Afton--the oldest ice cream shop in Minnesota! She had a cherry shake and I had a salted caramel ice cream cone...both were scrumpdillyicious, to borrow a word from a competing ice cream franchise.
Fast forward several weeks and we had our second adventure to Carley State Park in Plainview. We were a little early for the bluebells, although we did see a couple of tiny ones. Cubby found a teepee type structure that fascinated her, but her biggest enjoyment were the concrete blocks that needed to be traversed to cross the stream.
Me...not so much. The first set of concrete "stepping stones" wasn't bad but the second set had a 3-foot gap between the bank and the first block. Of course little Miss Nimble On Her Feet skipped right across and then looked back at her grandma.
"C'mon Grandma, just step quick on the rock, the log, and then the block." Uh-huh, sure. Listen, child of my child, my center of gravity is WAY different than yours so just let me do this myself. Yeah...it took me a good 60 seconds to accomplish what she did in a nanosecond. But I did it!
And then...
From the last block to the other bank there is, again, a 3-foot span of water but this time there are no handy objects to step on to get from here to there. Nope, I was going to have to launch myself and hope like heck I didn't face plant in the mud.
I even had my own little cheerleader for this as I was sort of bouncing to really spring through the air. Just as I was crouched and ready to leap, there was a voice behind me from a group of people I had no idea were there. Ermagerd....I flailed around mid leap and landed back on the block facing back at a woman and two men. The poor women who had spoke and robbed me of the last two years of my life looked as shocked as I felt and was apologizing up and down.
The guy behind her? Hmmmmm...he was laughing so hard I thought he was going to wet himself.
So was Cubby, for that matter.
With wounded pride and all, I managed to jump across far enough to (1) stay out of the stream and (2) not face plant in the mud. All good things in my world.
After THAT ordeal, the last leg of the hike was a set of steps that looked pretty daunting, but we powered through it and made it back to the van in one piece.
Next up in the Hiking Club adventure I believe will be Big Woods State Park in Nerstrand!
No comments:
Post a Comment