Up at 6am on my Day Off?!

Surely it must have been an accident that I was up at 6am on my Labor Day off right? Nope, it was on purpose. In a constant effort to do new things and see new places, NiBo suggested we go hiking at Turkey Run State Park. Ok sure, gets us out of the house into nature and it's exercise. Yup it sure was some exercise. 

After a short drive to pick up NiBo and a pit stop for gas and Gatorade  we were off! Onward to Indiana!

Finding the park was super easy, it was a right, then a left, and another left. For out of state visitors it was $7 to get in. We found our parking spot and with our backpacks packed and secured we hit the trails.

One thing that sucked is the main suspension bridge that gets you over the river was damaged by Spring flooding, so you had to go alllll the way to the other end of the park just to get over the river, but we did get to see a lovely covered bridge out of the detour.

I'm so glad that the weather cooperated and the temperatures were 'cooler' than they had been. Mostly sunny skies and a high of 85 was about as good of a day that you could ask for. Luckily most of the trails were under the protection of the trees, otherwise I might have fried. I thought that I was in 'better' shape since I've been working out and all, turns out that is not the case. Poor NiBo heard more than once, yeah I'm gonna need a breather. There were many many stairs to climb, up and down hills, then back down and up. We even had to break out our rock climbing skills in some parts.

The trails varied in terrain, some were sandy and kinda mushy; others were gravel or worn down dirt. It's hard to imagine how they decided on what trail should go which way and where this one should start and end. I had thought that since today was a holiday that there would be lots of people, but we really didn't run up on that many people. Also lucky for us, a map was provided at the entrance, although the trails were marked pretty clearly, except for that one, we may have missed the trail marking. YOLO! 

NiBo was your main photographer today (except the ones I took of him obvs) he was trying out his new Nokia 1020 Windows phone (he's no longer my iPhone buddy) but this bad boy phone boasts a 41 megapixel camera, so of course he was itching to really see what it can do. It works more like a DSLR camera with all kinds of manual settings you can use, so it's more camera than phone, but a phone will do you no good in the wilderness anyway. So here's a few of the sights we saw... and a few of NiBo hamming it up for the camera.

  

  

As you can tell NiBo is far more mobile and adventurous than I. I was more about enjoying the scenery than testing my limits today, although I had to do my fair share of boulder jumping (stepping) to get around. I mean just look at that last picture, we had to climb up those fallen rocks!

After we got all done with the sights on the far side of the river, we decided it was too much work to walk alllll the way back to the other end to the covered bridge to get across the river. So we walked across it to save us some time. The water came about up to our knees, and while it was not recommended blah blah, we did it anyway, and saved ourselves at least another hour of hiking.

It was a fun day, I won't lie it could have been a smidge cooler. Who knew carrying a backpack full of Gatorade would cause a sweat waterfall to form down your back, not very attractive let me tell you. But now that my feet hurt and my knees hurt it's time for bed. 

Hope everyone had a great Monday off of work, sorry that Tuesday is calling and we have to go back, but hey... at least it's a four-day work week! Enjoy!