Clifty Falls

   This past weekend we went to Clifty Falls, Indiana, for our annual church camping trip.  And as usual, it was LOTS of fun!      We left on Thursday morning, at about 11:30.  Our goal had been 10:00, but you know how that goes!  Anna, Bekah and Charissa were great at packing most of the camper for us while we were grocery shopping on Wednesday.  We have a master camping list that we can print off and they absolutely love packing the camper and checking those things off.

 

 

     I didn’t know this until later, but Anna was in the back of the van taking pictures of us!  Daddy, Mommy and the boys rode in the truck, pulling the camper, and we girls followed behind in the mini van.

  Notice the lilacs up front?!  We had just recently cut some, and wanted to enjoy them as much as possible, so we brought them along 🙂  They smelled so good, and later, made our picnic table look very pretty!

 

Anna got a good shot of some bridge construction that we went under .

 

 

When we finally got to Clifty Falls, and had eaten our supper, some of us girls went on a hike on "Trail 9" to the observation tower with Emily and Mary.  That was full of adventure!

 

 

    We girls kept teasing about there being bears and snipes out in the woods, and some of the girls were walking along calling, "Here snipe!" [clap, clap, clap] "Here snipey, snipe!" [clap, clap, clap] .  If you have no idea what a "snipe" is, see Pixar’s movie, "UP" . 

 

And if bears and snipes weren’t enough, there was an earthquake!

 

Alright, it wasn’t really an earthquake, but there was a long ditch that the girls had fun jumping over.  Our highest jump record was 110 times by Anna.

 

Mary had an especially hard time jumping over this very wide part of the ditch!

 

This picture turned out  blurry, but it looks kind of like a painting or something 🙂

 

The three towers we saw toward the end of the trail.

 

  

We got to climb to the top of this observation tower

 

 When we got to the top, we all felt a little lightheaded, but the view was great!  The two pictures below were to the left of us.

 

We could see across the Ohio river to Kentucky.

 

 The towers were directly in front of us…and here is a close up of one of them.  We were high enough already, but can you imagine being on the top of one of those?!

 

 The view to the right of us…

    

…and to the far right . You can barely see it in the picture, but there was a fog coming up out of the trees.  It was so pretty!

 

   

     The next morning, we went on a hike with a lot of the people from our church…we were gone for three hours, and it was quite the rugged hike!  But we love hikes, and I especially love rugged ones, so it was a lot of fun! 

There were these big rocks, covered in moss and ferns and wild columbine…it was so pretty!

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, at the end of trail 2 (which is really just the creek bed) we got to see "Big Clifty" 🙂  Most of us were not very impressed! Especially after  having to go on such a long hike to see it!  Later we got to see "Big Clifty" from a different angle, and it was a lot prettier than I had first thought 🙂

 

    We climbed up a ladder to a little lookout balcony, and it was a little better view, but we still weren’t able to fully appreciate it until later.  During the whole 3 hour hike, it was pretty much constantly drizzling or raining.  So by the time we got back, we were quite soaked! 

 

Later that day, we took some pictures at the playground .  Little kids are SO fun to watch!  Somebody had brought a colorful "parachute" and they were having a lot of fun with that!

 

    They had this yellow ball that they were throwing up into the air and then catching it again with the parachute!  At first just the girls were playing, but then some of the boys got in on it 🙂   When it was just a bunch of squealing, giggling girls doing it, I overheard one boy tell another, "I don’t know, maybe the squealing helps or something!"

 

You can see a video of them doing it HERE.

 

Then they put Paul in there.  I think he thought that was pretty fun!

 

Paul and Isaiah

(Kate and Emily’s brothers 🙂

 

  At one point, I was sitting with Paul and Valerie on the side of the playground on those boards that you see, I said, "Be careful, because there might be poison ivy here."  I shouldn’t have pointed that out, because then they wanted to touch all the green behind them!  I looked closer and to my relief there was no poison ivy, but Paul asked me, "Is it poisonous?"  I replied that it was. 

He then declared, "Well I’m not dead yet!"

{Valerie and Isaiah}

 

After they were tired of playing with the ball, they all climbed to the top of the playset and it looked as though they were trying to parachute off of it!  They didn’t…thankfully!

 

Charissa having fun 🙂

 

The two Rebekah’s 🙂

 

I pried James away from Susannah  He was a much sought after baby this past weekend!

 

   Susannah with James.  He especially likes her and smiles for her all the time 🙂 Okay, he wasn’t for this one!

 

Can you guess who is holding him?!  Yep, Susannah .

 

This picture is a little out of place, but you can see our crazy messy campsite.  It’s a good thing we never took a picture of the inside of the camper!!!

 

   On Saturday, we loaded up the minivan with about 13 little girls and boys, not including Leah, a friend, and myself!  We drove as close as we could get to Little Clifty, and then went on a short hike to see the falls 🙂   Did I mention how much fun little people are?

(my apologies to Anna, Emily, and Mary…you aren’t little but you still sure are fun!)

 

 

 

Some little falls we saw

 

"Little Clifty"

 

 

 Remember when I said that we got to see "Big Clifty" later on?  Here it is 🙂

 

After our hike, we went up to the playground near the falls.

 

     It was very cute…every single one of the girls (and the four boys!) got their own map when we came to see Little Clifty!  Here is "the other" Rebekah, and Charissa with theirs 🙂 

 

 

Valerie

 

She told me, "Cuh-cuh, you.catch.me" 

 

Isn’t she adorable?!

 

{Bekah}

 

 

 

   On the way back, we followed Kate and Emily’s dad (he had brought Valerie, and some other kids), and it was wild in our van!  I had thirteen little people squealing, "Hurry up!  Pass him, pass him!  Beat him, beat him! We gotta beat him! Hurry, hurry, hurry!"   At one point, he stopped to pick up some boys who had started to walk back, and all the little girls in my van were squealing again, "PASS HIM! PASS HIM! PASS HIM!"  

   That evening we were going to have a potluck dinner together, but it was really beginning to rain.  Thankfully we found a nice cozy shelter, complete with a fireplace, so we didn’t have to give up our s’mores!  I took the pictures on my phone, so some of them are not the greatest quality, but you get the idea! After we were done eating, we sat around the fireplace and sang and gave testimonies.  It was so much fun.

 

 

 

The resolution on this one is not that great, but I still thought it was a cute one of Isaiah and Daddy!

 

Valerie had a big day 🙂

 

     The next morning we had church outside.  The weather was perfect!  We had sunshine and a nice breeze and NO rain!  We kept praying for nice weather that weekend, and though we still had our share of rain, we got to see a radar screen of the weather during the weekend, and discovered that there were storms all around us and just above where we were was a little rift in the clouds.  God is SO good!  We were also supposed to have tornadoes and thunderstorms, but all we got was a little lightning and a little thunder on Saturday night 🙂

 

 

 

 

Isaiah was very happy to sit between the two Rebekahs 🙂

 

 

After church, we packed up, and visited a little longer, then we finally had to head home  It was very sad to have to go!  Anna got this picture as we were leaving. 

 

Good bye, Clifty Falls!  We had lots of fun!

 On the way home we stopped at a rest stop and several of us got some yummies from the vending machines…something we don’t usually do!  We did have an incident of spilled coffee in the back seat, but that was the driver’s fault (mine) for going over a curb.    We left way ahead of Kate and Emily’s family, but they passed us, and we passed them, and they passed us and left us way behind .  However, we did find out that we got home at the same time, much to Cassia’s relief.   We girls stopped at a Dairy Queen close to home since they were having a "Buy one Blizzard get one for 25¢" .  That was yummy!

  When we finally did get home, we had a relay system to get the camper unpacked.  Two or three girls were in the camper, loading everything into baskets, two of us carried the baskets in the pouring rain to the garage, and two girls were inside unloading them 🙂  We had it unloaded and put away in no time!  Although there are still traces of it today…mostly piles of dirty laundry that need to be caught up!

 

 Come back tomorrow for a few more pictures of Clifty Falls…we’re going to have a not-so-Wordless-Wednesday!

 

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