Press space (the images go along with the text below) I went hiking today with my mom, her friend, and her friend's son. The hiking trail we went to was two hours away, so we had to get up at 5 so we could leave at 5:30 in the morning. So we drove up, I listened to music, my mom listened to a podcast. We get to the place and realize we have no idea where we are supposed to go. We pull into this parking lot but the signs didn't say we were at the trail parking and then we see a sign with the trail's name saying it's 2.7 miles away. So we hop back into the car and pull onto this dirt road that goes up a MOUNTAIN. We're driving along, no idea where we're going, the car is bouncing all over the place because our car wasn't meant for a mountain road, especially not a gravel one, and we ended up driving 6 miles up a mountain. My mom is panicking at this point and she keeps trying to call her friend but we have no cell service, no idea where we are, top of a mountain (although the view was very nice). My mom then decides to drive back down, but because she just wants to get down the mountain, we're going 25, 30 on a 15 mph road, going around curves and such. These curves have no guardrails or anything so going off the curve would mean a straight drop. We make it back to the parking lot, still don't have reception, so we drive back onto the road to try to find service and regroup. My mom's friend ends up driving past us and her friend was sticking their head out the window trying to find us. We pull over onto the side of the road and it turns out, we had passed the trailhead, and just barely missed my mom's friend who pulled into the parking lot three minutes after we began driving up the treacherous road of sheer death. So we head back to the parking lot, walk to the trailhead instead of driving, and begin our hike an hour late. Little backstory here, when I was little we went camping with my mom's friend (same one we went hiking with today) and there was a snail on my chair so now the inside joke is snails. We find a LOT of snails on this trail. Three snail lives were lost in the process :,( (from now on my mom will not be invited to visit my snail farm when I grow up, because she stepped on a lot of snails). We saw two snakes on the path and a cannibalistic snail (image 1) eating a millipede (hence came the joke that snails live off the hearts of other animals). Then we ate pretzels on a big rock on the side of the river, then hiked over to the narrow, which was a tall, thin waterfall (image 2). We went a bit further and made it to the bottom of the narrow (image 3 and 4) and ate lunch (my sandwich was all soggy :/). That's where I caught Fredrick the butterfly (image 5, hehe you get to see my hand). I accidentally crippled him when I caught him (oops) so I carefully carried him three miles back to the start of the trail and placed him in the grass of the parking lot where he will hopefully live out the rest of his days. Then we went to get ice cream and the bathroom at the ice cream place smelled really good, which is weird cause you wouldn't think a bathroom would smell good. After that, we parted ways, drove the two hours back home, and then I fell asleep to my dog snoring somehow until my mom woke me up.
Photos taken by me :)
