The Sun Came Out!

After cloudy misty days, we were so excited to see the sun shining on Friday!  We had spent the rainy Thursday eating way too much, and we needed some exercise.  On Thursday we went to the local restaurant--Bill and Rosa's--for breakfast with a group of people from our RV park.  We returned to the same restaurant on Thursday evening with another group of friends for the all-you-can-eat-spaghetti-and-garlic-bread meal.  It sounds like someone needs to be exercising more and eating less!

So after line dance class on Friday morning, we headed to the nearest state park for another day of hiking!  We really love getting outside and getting exercise while we enjoy nature.

We went back to Garner State Park, where we had hiked five days before.  But this time, when we were on the hill tops we could see for miles around!  The picture above was taken from Painted Rock view point towards one of our earlier destinations--Mount Baldy.

In true "Wandering His Wonders" fashion, we started at one trailhead and literally wandered around the trail system for the entire afternoon.  If you mapped our hike, it would look like:  Crystal Cave Trail to Bridges Trail to Painted Rock back to Bridges Trail to Bell Trail to Donovan Trail to Campos Trail to Hiway Trail to Wilks Trail to Bell Trail to Foshee Trail to Old Baldy Summit to Old Baldy Trail.  We could never replicate that exact hike again, but we love the many adjoining trails that allow for endless loops.  We hiked about 6 miles, or probably enough to burn one meatball and a cup of spaghetti.

Our first stop on the hike was at the Crystal Cave.  It's a 30-foot deep cavern that you can scramble into.  Sadly, a few people with spray paint cans have already been there.  Don't even get Denisa started on how she feels about people defacing beautiful areas with graffiti.

Once we traversed towards Old Baldy, we just had to stop at a view point where we took a very cloudy picture five days earlier.  Now we can actually see all those beautiful valleys that we just had to imagine were there on the earlier hike.

Instead of Mark's Baldy Summit pose, "Old Baldy" took a picture of Denisa this time just to prove we did it twice. 

We have been enjoying the tangerines that we brought with us from the Rio Grande Valley.  We have found that they are perfect for hikes as they give quick energy as well as quench your thirst.  Most people are familiar with determining how far you can travel on a tank of gas by figuring the miles per gallon.  Well, we have found that we are getting about one mile per tangerine.  So today's six mile hike took about 4 hours and 6 tangerines.

After making it through all those trail changes to hike all over the state park, we somehow managed to lose the trail coming down from the summit to the parking lot.  We knew that going down was the right direction, but we missed the proper trail head.  You can see that we are living on the edge, taking the dangerous route down.

We had to hurry home from the hike so we could meet friends at 5:00.  We have been blessed with meeting so many friendly people!