First thing I have to say is that there are WAY to many photos to blog from this adventure. Between Matt and I, two cameras, we came home with just over 600 raw images. After editing, it whittled down to 226, which are all uploaded on Flickr. I can’t justify posting all the ‘Good Ones’ here in this post because it would make this post ridiculously long.

So we will try this (fingers crossed, here): I will try really, really hard to only put a few in the body, then include a gallery viewer at the end so if you are so inclined, you can flip through all of them. Something new, we’ll see how it goes.

Anyways. So Monday we took a Family Day and went out to Discovery Park with the intention of doing some light hiking, hoping the two Toddlers could hike all on their own. I was curious to see how far we could get, especially after Tallis was in constant meltdown mode from the second we put her in the car. She didn’t want to wear her Keens, there was something in her shoes, Araiya took her book, she was hungry, she was too hot, she was too cold, the complaints go on. Honestly I thought we might get 50 feet down the trail from the parking lot and have to turn back. The think with Tallis lately has been her fickleness.

So we made it to the meadow.

Then the Dunes.

And the girls were having a blast.

And decided to try going down the 3/4 mile trail to the beach, all of which Tallis walked, by herself, with the exception of the last few hundred yards and stairs down.

We happened to arrive during an extremely low tide, so all the tide pools were exposed allowing us to take the girls and explore.

Araiya was not at all impressed with the sea life we saw, they were scary and/or she didn’t like them, the story frequently changed.

Tallis, by that time was completely over her whiney-ness. You may notice she has a different pair of pants on in the latter images. That’s because her whining culminated in her peeing her pants as soon as we sat down for lunch at the beach as she was so worked up and whiney none of us could comprehend what in the world she was continuing to whine about.

So then after lunch and beach exploration, we started the hike back up, stopping frequently at the little look-out ‘tree houses’ along the trail.

Somehow, Tallis made it all the way back up, series after series of stairs, dragging a walking stick along beside her. As we reached the top, the afternoon sky was looking a bit ominous over the sound, so we decided we’d better make our way out of the park in case it decided to rain (or Sprenkle, as the girls would say).

Back across the dunes, across the meadow (where we detoured into a field full of bright purple flowers), where Tallis finally decided she needed to be carried on Matt’s shoulders, and arriving finally in the parking lot, where Tallis and Pia promptly fell asleep.

Overall, I think we hiked about 3 miles, left the house at 11:45 am and got back home about 4:30 pm. A very FULL day, to say the least.

And now, for the slideshow, which is in backwards order, oops (click on an image to open the viewer):