Nature Walk

Do you ever experience a bad version of something, and it causes you to crave The Real Thing?  This happens to me frequently.  Say, I’ll eat a brownie at a party, and halfway into it I’ll realize that it’s a sub-par brownie, and within a week I am mixing up a batch at home.  M recently requested burgers because she’d eaten a “yucky” one at a birthday party.

It goes beyond food.  As I mentioned yesterday, I felt pretty caged in at High Falls Gorge.  So within a week of our return home, we were taking a hike at Plotter Kill Preserve in Rotterdam.

Kids Love a Bridge

The waterfalls are, of course, more spectacular in the spring, but it still gave us plenty of opportunities to wade and hop from stone to stone.  In fact, the preserve’s a great “starter” hike for kids.  There’s plenty of interest, with stairways and bridges–what is it about a bridge on a nature walk?  It seems like every time I’m hiking with kids, they always shriek and run toward a bridge when it’s spotted.

The bridge pictured here is close to the entrance on the red trail–probably not even a five-minute walk into the preserve.  To increase the adventure quotient, we kept finding little, quick-moving frogs hiding among the rocks and water.  Later, closer to the big falls, we were able to climb down toward the water’s surface, where there were little cave-like areas in the stone that the girls enjoyed, too.  It certainly satisfied our craving to immerse ourselves in some wet nature after the hamster cages!