Nature trail, Pics

We went to a state park nearby. I’m not sure that I’ve ever been to a state park, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. For some reason, I suppose I expected it to be mostly the same as a normal park. Well, yeah. It’s not.

First, we walked along a nature trail (paved) lined on both sides by row after row of walnut trees.

One actually dropped a few feet ahead of us while we were walking! As you can see, the trees are fairly tall, so after this, I was constantly on guard, waiting for one of these large walnut shells to drop from eighty feet in the air and land on my head. Praise the lord, it never happened to any of us.

We saw some very very large mushroom at one point.

 

It’s hard to tell from the photo, but they’re about the size of a human head.  And no we didn’t destroy the mushroom, they looked like they had exploded!

My wife mentioned that she’d heard of a certain type of mushroom that actually explodes once it reaches a certain size. We weren’t sure if this was the same type, or if more likely, it was destroyed by other visitors (kids like ours probably). In fact, Mandie wanted to see if they’d explode if we poked at one of the larger ones with a stick. We didn’t, as I didn’t want to disturb them. I don’t really like to destroy things.

It was a very pleasant walk. For once, we could just let the children run about as far away as they wanted to with minimal direction on our own part. They’ve never gotten to do this before as in the city, you have to constantly be weary of traffic, but not so here.

Next, we went to the playground area. I don’t have a picture of it, but they had a very large slide built into the side of a hill. The kids enjoyed it very much, but then only seemed to want to swing…which is something they can do in our backyard….

We finished up by driving past the horse-riding area. Not far away was a very militaristic visitor’s center. We later discovered that the park was actually a converted army fort.

So, if you have small children, nature walk. Highly recommended!

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