Rocking and Rolling

....or perhaps it should be rolling and rocking since the rolling happened first.

A few weeks ago (ok, it's been exactly a month already....good grief, where does the time go?), we decided that my sister's birthday provided the perfect excuse to take an impromptu road trip to visit her, and at the same time cross a couple of things off our summer bucket list.

First up.....Roller Skating

I think roller skating takes the cake for the most fun I've had all summer. I'm not sure if it's because I could totally skate circles around Chris or because I completely SMOKED HIM ON THE RINK! (Chris pointed out that I was saying the same thing twice in the previous sentence. I told him that was my intention. I wanted to get my point clearly across:)
Skating circles around Chris may not sound like much of an accomplishment, but trust me, it is. You see I am lacking quite considerably in the area of coordination, and this fact provides Chris with a great deal of satisfaction. My klutziness furnishes him with endless entertainment, and he rests easy knowing he can do pretty much everything better than me....except cartwheels and, now, roller-skating.

Brace yourselves, the pictures are bad because the lighting was hideous and I'm not skilled enough to pull off decent pictures in awful lighting......

My mom even ventured out with skates on......

The picture below of Owen doing the splits makes me laugh. He was so excited about roller skating and talked about it for days. However, when we actually got there and he put on skates, he wasn't thrilled. He said it was slippery and he wanted to take them off. He skated for a while and then headed to play in the bounce-house-jumper things. The addition of the bounce-house-playthings was genius. They were right next to the rink, so littles could jump and play while the rest of us skated, but we could still easily keep an eye on them.

At the end of the night, they turned the lights on and held a few races. The first race was simply making a lap around the rink on skates. Grace won a free drink, I didn't get any pictures. The next was a turtle race on these little scooters. Lily won this race and a free drink.

We stayed the night at Marsie's and headed out the next day in search of an adventure. Our first stop was at Pathfinder dam, where we heard the dam was overflowing for the first time ever because of all the extra moisture this year.

We checked out the upper part of the dam and then hiked around to get a better view of the water falling to the river below.

This part made me nervous. I didn't get very close to the edge. The drop-off was steep and rocky, and you really couldn't see very far below because there was so much mist coming off the falling water.

We drove around below where there was a swinging bridge, and another bridge and walking path that were completely submerged in the high water.

Our next stop of the day was Independence Rock.

We played for a bit in the shade before walking to check out the rock.

Owen loves his grandpa.

 If I had been to Independence rock before, it was a long time ago. It's huge, way bigger than I had anticipated it being.

The big girls were adventurous and headed straight for the top.

Not to be outdone, the dads also headed for the top.

 We stayed with the babies at the bottom of the rock.

We waved at the thrill-seekers who nimbly climbed and then proudly stood at the tippy-top of that giant rock.

The next adventure of the day was a handcart trek into Martin's Cove. 

Stay tuned....