black friday

We thought we would start a new tradition of going somewhere over Thanksgiving weekend, just the five of us, and having a holiday that is just for us. It's not that we don't love spending time with our families. We do! It's that we also feel like this time of year, we are always rushing from one celebration to another, and keeping track of all the details and things to bring and coordinating everything with everyone else tends to leave us with no time to just ... stop ... and take the time to really appreciate how great it is that Mike and I found each other, and that because we did, we made this beautiful family. So we decided that this year, we would find a place and a way to do that. It seems to us that the best times we have aren't necessarily when we do something like go to a museum or schedule an event; our best times have been spent outdoors, on our own schedule, just meandering together in uncrowded places. And with that in mind, we chose Starved Rock for our first shot at this new tradition.

It worked out much better than we would have thought, and for reasons that we wouldn't have anticipated. It was cold and drizzly this morning, which meant that nobody else was around. We wandered around for a few hours, and we saw only two other people out on the trails the whole time! Just the way we like it. We climbed the stairs to the top of Starved Rock and took in the views of the river and locks, then we headed to French Canyon, where the boys got to climb down and see a waterfall up close and personal.

After that, we drove to the other end of the park and headed off to see the Council Overhang and Ottawa Canyon. The overhang was breathtaking; I think the boys liked it the best of everything we saw. Sadly for us, once we continued on we discovered that the trail to Ottawa Canyon was flooded, so we couldn't complete our mission. On the plus side, that gives us an incentive to come back again! I would love to see the ice falls in the winter, so hopefully we can make that happen.