In lieu of birthday parties, this year we chose an activity for each boy's birthday. For Lucas's birthday, we spent a day at Burger's Lake in Fort Worth with another family (pictures forthcoming). For Josh's birthday, we rented a cabin at Turner Falls, Oklahoma, and enjoyed a weekend of swimming, hiking, skipping rocks, and roasting marshmallows. It was a lot of fun.
We arrived Friday night but took it easy. We unpacked, had dinner out, and then drove around the campground area to get familiar with the layout. Saturday morning, we took a hike that we thought would take us to two caves and a stone "castle." We were all very excited when we found the first cave:
The excitement lasted until Josh saw a few spiders, and we had to ease both of the boys' fears by explaining they were just daddy long legs and were harmless. But then John realized there were in reality about a THOUSAND spiders in the cave. We quickly made our exit.
We continued down the trail looking for the castle. We had to do some quite technical rock scrambling and the boys were pretty impressive in their ability to handle it. When we reached the bottom of the trail, we arrived not at the stone castle, but at Turner Falls itself:
The way back up was much easier technically (as it was easier to find footholds and climb up than it was to climb down and fear sliding or falling), but cardiovascularly it was more difficult, of course! We passed another small cave, but given the keyhole (above Josh's head) and the knowledge that a cliff leading down to the waterfalls was likely on the other side, we didn't let the boys explore this one:
Lucas fell and skinned his hand at the top of the hill, fortunately just a few minutes away from the car. Although it was cut pretty badly, he was a great sport about letting me clean it out and get it bandaged back at the cabin. From there, Lucas and I went back to the Falls to swim (walking from our cabin this time, not driving up a hill and hiking down again!), and John and Josh headed out on a second hike. They went through some serious rock-climbing portions to reach the top of another hill, which was full of cactus and pretty blue sky:
After their hike, John and Josh met us at the Falls to swim for awhile, and then we headed back to the cabin for lunch. After lunch, we went to a different swimming location in the park: Blue Hole. It has two big slides (you can see one in the background of the photo below) and a diving board. Both swimming holes are part of the Honey River, which runs through the entire campground. A small dam allows the water to pool at the base of the waterfall for the first swimming area, and then the river runs along for half a mile or so through the campground (providing lots of small pooled areas to swim and play) until it reaches the second dammed area, which creates Blue Hole. The boys (and John!) loved practicing their dives, and Lucas got quite comfortable swimming from one area to another with the safety of his lifevest.
After watching Josh complete several dives, Lucas was ready to give it a try:
And Josh worked on perfecting his dive, trying to disturb as little water as possible:
After a long time in the swimming hole, we went over the small dam and into the more tranquil pools below:
Back at the cabin, it was time for showers, dinner, and then S'MORES! We loved roasting our marshmallows over an open fire:
And we loved eating the fruits of our labor too!
