Hiking and other adventures

Humans always seem to be impressed by the very small or the vast. The fact that my son is right at six feet tall makes the ledge in this picture even more impressive. He almost looks like a child standing on it. This is another picture from our visit to Ricketts Glen State Park, a truly amazing place with many waterfalls.

I went on a short hike with my son, my daughter and my grandson. The others were doing different things. Michael was going to have to take a phone call from work and he needed to find an area with cell phone reception (the fun never stops) and my son-in-law stayed with my granddaughter who was throwing big rocks into the water as opposed to the small rocks she threw into the water at Frances Slocum State Park on a previous day.

My son has been on more hikes than you can count but I'm thinking this is the first time I've taken one with him. I've never been much of an outdoors person (although in childhood I remember living outside a lot of the time.) This turned out to be an enlightening experience. I have no sense of direction and I never thought that he had much of one either, but he and my daughter both seemed to do equally well at knowing where they were in a very shady forest. He also showed himself to be very aware and observant of things around him. He managed to find a very tiny red salamander and later an enormous green caterpillar to show my grandson. I would never have spotted either of them. He's so car-oriented, it was great to see how well he functions without anything mechanical in sight. It's great fun when you discover something new about one of your children. My daughter shamed me as I was having trouble negotiating some of the slippery rocks. I couldn't complain as she is quite a few months pregnant and was wearing backless sandals. We had a laugh about that on the trail.

Moving to Pennsylvania has both forced me and encouraged me to learn and improve on rusty skills (like being outdoors). I would never have worked with contractors if Michael hadn't had to leave me behind to take care of fixing up the Denton house. I've had to learn about negotiating and compromise. And I've had to make a lot more decisions about our home both here and in Texas because he's not around to help with that. I'm not doing a good job at it, but I'm doing more gardening here than I ever did in Texas. And the whole adventure of driving myself to Philly, getting to the airport, and then dealing with a car problem on my return in the wee hours of the morning was a huge stretch for me. This area and its climate is unlike any place I've ever lived, and I'm learning to deal with a new culture. In a more abstract sense, I've learned to be more patient and flexible. (I still have a long way to go on both of those.) My biggest challenge now is to try and manage the huge chunks of "free" time I have and make decisions on how to best use it.