As I mentioned last week, I am very proud of us and super excited to have claimed Thursdays this summer as our Adventure Explorer day. This is the day that the boys and I will venture across town to the Garden of the Gods to explore and discover a new area of the park each week. This place is so big that I am certain we will not run out of nooks and crannies to nose around in by the end of the summer.

Every Thursday afternoon or Friday, I will plan to post photos of our adventure and new discoveries from that week. So, without further ado…I give you…Adventure Explorers Week 2!

This is the entrance to the park. It is what we see each time we drive in. It never gets old. It makes us feel very excited to know that new adventures await us out there!

This here is the Visitor Center. This is the view from behind us from where that top picture was taken. It is across the street from the park entrance. I always giggle when I see it because I think it reminds me of the visitor’s center in the movie Jurassic Park!

Logan was being kind of affectionate towards me before we began our trek, so I thought I would see if I could get a nice shot of the two of us…because affection from my big guy is few and far between these days. He’s just occupied by so many other things and ideas that hugging mom isn’t on the top of his list…it’s ok. BUT, as soon as I tried to capture a tender moment, this happened. So, instead of bugging him about smiling nicely over and over, I remembered the saying, If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!

Week 2 would have had us journey across the street from Balanced Rock to the rock area where the boys saw people scaling around last time, so that is where we started out.

This is the rock that is across from Balanced Rock. We were fascinated by these steps that on top of it! We’ll call these steps Item of Discovery No. 1. The boys thought it made perfect sense to just scurry on up and climb the stairs! They were stairs after all! But, to our dismay, there was a sign prohibiting such free-spirited shenanigans since too many people have been hurt in the past.

Logan really struggled with accepting this fact, but eventually came to terms with it and decided it would be OK to go back to where we were last week and try to get to the top of the rock that we couldn’t figure out before.

It’s like I said, no two places in this park are the same…there is always something new to look at.

Why try to get them to smile when they will much more successfully make a goofy face!

Item of Discovery No. 2: A nail in the rock! We couldn’t even pull it out! Hmm…Excalibur of the Rockies?

Item of Discovery No. 3: This “pool” is empty!

It looked like this last week. Alien water, obviously. But this week it was gone, to the utter confusion of the boys. Did it just dry up? Or did the aliens come back for it? We may never know!

At this point, one might think we had arrived at the top of said rock destination, but we hadn’t yet…this is still in a different location than last time, though. You better believe this was when I began shouting. Not because I was mad or anything like that…but because I was scaring the whits out of myself the way I had us climbing around these rocks! If you were a passer-by (which there weren’t any…) you might wonder if you were hearing some odd bird squawking things like, “Don’t move!” Stop moving!” “Stay there!” “For the love of Pete, STOP!”

Haha! It’s true! I did say those things, but it was out of love and since my kids are very brave and think they can frollick about on a cliff’s edge, I needed them to hear me. Now, don’t be alarmed…only I hung my feet off of this cliff. But I had to, because this was our destination! It wasn’t easy to get to. And my husband and the boy’s grandmothers would be very disappointed with me for bringing them up there in the first place.

My children’s blood runs a little like mine. We just have to see if we can make it a little further up…that’s all…just a little further…it’s safe!

Ah, yes! The feeling of conquering what we thought we couldn’t. We did it together…by helping each other, pulling each other by the hand and pushing each other from the rear-end! Logan named the climb and our successful venture, “The Path to Victory!”

Once we were to the top, it was totally flat and safe. See? We could all sprawl out. Perhaps if we’d had a blanket, we could have napped!

So, you see, this part here (where you can see Logan’s head) is the bottom of where we ended up. To get back to the climbing part (oh yea, where we had to climb down) we had to make our way back up to where those rocks are behind the trees. That was where we had climbed up to be on top of. It was quite comical, actually, the climbing down part. Logan went first on his rear-end. Followed by Eli and I with Eli on my lap and the ledge upon which we were scooting down was pretty much the width of my hips. So funny. We certainly made a memory.

Ah, what a lovely time! I know I speak for my guys, too, when I say that we can’t wait for next Thursday to see what Items of Discovery we stumble upon then!