Vacation...All I Ever Wanted...

Last week we packed up the Jeep and headed west to our neighboring state of Ohio. We rented a cabin in the Hocking Hills area. It's a lot of woods, a few caves and probably more churches than houses! But, it was beautiful, and we had a very relaxing time. Noah had a great time. He experienced a lot of firsts during this trip - his first nights in a big boy bed. (We just haven't moved him at home yet). He did fantastic! In fact, he slept in until 8 am every day. I'm glad one of us slept because I didn't. Between being worried about him in a big bed in a strange place and just knowing that Jason was going to come creeping out of the woods to chop us in to bits at any minute, I barely slept a wink.

Anyway, Noah also visited his first cave. You can see him above in a little recess in a place we visited called Old Man's Cave. It was truly beautiful, we walked back through huge trees, crossed these great stone bridges and climbed about a million steps to get to Old Man's Cave. Supposedly an "old man" and his 2 dogs settled there and lived out their lives there in the late 1700's. Surprisingly, Noah walked the entire hour we explored the caves. He kept saying "This is AMAZING!!" And he was very independent, and would only hold our hands when we insisted. (Like on this bridge - I had the death grip on him!) Below us is a thing called The Devil's Bathtub. The shape the water has worn away in the rocks looks like a bathtub, and they say that once you get in there, the current is so swift, that there's no way to pull you out. And over the falls you go.
He also sat around his first campfire and roasted his first marshmellow. He found that eating them right out of the bag was much quicker! He came away with a mantra from our time out there. "Mans pee in the woods and get dirty". This came from him not understanding why I didn't pee on the trees like he did. It was one of his favorite activities. All in all we had a great time. I'll post a few more specific stories later.