Our New Exercise Program

After four days at low speed with our Mothers, the next stop on our family road trip takes a 6.5 hour drive to Kansas City to visit our oldest son's family. Just as we had honored our mothers the day before, our son prepared a steak dinner to honor his wife and his Mother. After dinner, we snapped this picture at the fire pit in their back yard.

We arrived in time to do some baby-sitting with our granddaughter. Our daughter-in-law is working part-time now, and we snapped this picture on one of her working days. They both looked so cute even early in the morning!

Both parents have a day off on Wednesday, so we got some good exercise together. We took a family walk at one of the many parks near their home in Lenexa, Kansas. It was just a three mile drive to get to Black Hoof Park. We love these city parks that make us feel like we are far away from the city. We took pictures of the water views of Lenexa Lake and the forest that surrounds it.

One side of the lake has a paved trail with a more manicured feeling.

The dam provides another nice piece of infrastructure. This dam and park is another part of the "Lenexa Vision 2020" plan that was hatched in 1997.

It looks like they have been successful in meeting their goal of projects for this community that provide a "superior quality of life and respect for the natural environment." Besides the manufactured playground equipment, we really liked this section of all-natural balance beams and stepping logs in the shade. We got a little exercise here too.

Not stopping with Vision 2020, we found that Lenexa has plans for 2030 and 2040 already in the works. It will be fun to watch the continuing changes in store for this city. On the other side of the dam, the paved trail turns into a dirt path through the forest. Once again, we feel very far from the city that makes this park available to all of us for free.

But we aren't here just for taking walks in the park. We are working! Did we mention we are baby-sitting our granddaughter? That would give us an excuse to insert another picture of her. Since her recent birthday, she has a new trick. She will lift her index finger and smile in response to Gram's enthusiastic question, "Carter, how old are you?"

As part of our rigorous baby-sitting duties, we take Carter for a walk each morning. We're at Craig Crossing Park, just a half-mile stroller ride from their front door. 

This day's walk also included a snake sighting. Mark spotted this slimy guy crawling down a tree right beside the trail. His head is at the bottom of the picture as he makes two 90 degree turns down the tree bark on his way to the ground.

This day we would make a four-mile loop on city park trails. These trails have some good elevation changes, as we are now looking down on the bridge we used to cross the creek.

We got other forms of exercise during our stay. We used their rowing machine and lifted weights. They have a nice gym in their basement, but Mark preferred lifting weights like this.

We also got good aerobic exercise when Carter showed delight when Denisa danced to the songs playing on her new birthday toys. Then we found she was even more delighted when we held her and danced to the songs. Now that's some good exercise! We found we would do anything to make her smile!

It probably can't be counted as exercise, but we sure giggled when we made a tent on the couch for Miss Carter to crawl under. Those curly locks were standing straight out from the static electricity. What fun!

We are here to spend time with our kids, and it's nice that we're also getting some good exercise too. But now we have two more road trips planned as Mark and Denisa are about to go their separate ways . . .