Saturday in Beatenberg.

So on Friday I made sure ALL the housework was done so that we could play on Saturday.  In fact, I’m pretty, actually really, impressed with my list of of chores I crossed off.  All the laundry, the dishes, vacuumed the whole house (actually Hazel and Jethro did that, but I had to get them to do it), cleaned the bathroom, swept and mopped the kitchen, cleaned out the fridge super well, Ethne dusted the front room, cleaned off the kitchen countertop completely, and did cobwebs.  Woohoo.

Then Saturday was quite overcast and cold in the morning, which means I was grumpy and put-out.  Brett went mountain biking, and I decided while he was gone to make tin foil dinners because even if it was overcast and coldish all day, at least we could go in the woods by our house to cook them and eat them.

When Brett got home I told him to find some place we could go to cook our tin foil dinners, even better if we could do a hike first.  So he drove us to Beatenberg because we had been there before and knew for sure there was a good fire pit.  Somehow I didn’t realize he was planning to go to the exact same trail we went on with the Nicks before.  I wasn’t a fan of the idea of going to the exact place we had already been to, but it all worked out very nicely because we went up the trail a little ways and then took an offshoot up a different way.  Voila- everyone was happy.  But that’s why some of the pictures look like ones you’ve already seen.  And it was a beautiful day even!  The clouds went away and it was just perfect.

Orrin is so good at making hilarious faces.  It’s a skill.

The cool ship.

The kids all had their backpack on with a rain jacket and their dinner.  (And I’ve got to find someplace that has whistles, so I can get everyone one.)

So, right by this curve of road with the cows on it was the great fire spot with some picnic tables and wood and a grill and an ax and some tongs and a paring knife—pretty much everything you could want.  So, we thought we would just leave our dinners there while we went farther up the trail.  Unfortunately, upon taking out our dinners, we found that of the 5 backpacks carrying the dinners, four of them had had hamburger juice leaked into them.  The problems being that we had given the kids a plastic bag to put their dinners in, but not supervised the actual operation to be sure they were twisted and knotted securely.  So of course they weren’t.  And then in the one that had Brett’s and mine and Baby’s, the forks had poked holes in the bag.  That was annoying, but we took out all the dinners and washed the backpacks and rainjackets in the creek, and then left mostly everything there in the sun while we went on.

So it was a pretty neat trail, up through the woods, with lots of stairs carved out for us.

The kids stopped here to rest, so I told everyone to get ready for a picture, and I climbed down near the edge of the cliff to set the camera on a rock so I could use the timer, and Brett said, “Be careful on those rocks!”  and I said, “I’m fine, don’t worry,”  and he said, “Not you, the camera!”  :)

We actually didn’t make it quite to the top—even though I think we were realllllly close, but the kids were starving (so they told us) and some really dark clouds were moving in.  So we turned around.  It was a bit of a shame.  Can you spy Brett and the kids in the picture below?

When we were still near the top, Orrin started crying and crying so finally Brett took him out of the baby carrier and just held him for a while, but then he demanded to be set down.  Now, the way was still really steep, but Brett just held on to him, and he walked/fell (probably mostly fell) the whole rest of the way down.  It was so funny. 

Once we got down here, he refused to even hold Brett’s hand.  And he’s down.

And up again.

And down.

Down.

Crazy kid.  :)

So.  We made it back to our dinner spot in a really short time.  The kids played in the creek while Brett made the fire.

Ethne in her new hiking shoes (new from Landi, nothing high-end here but they seemed to do the trick).

So, the lighter that we brought had gotten wet when we washed all the bags out, so it wasn’t lighting at all, so Brett was taking it apart to see if he could get it to work (I was already thinking of if I could go back to the milking barn we had passed where the farmer was milking, to ask if he had some matches), and then he dropped a little piece into the fireplace, and felt around to pick it up, and found a hot coal.  So he picked it up and blew on it, and started the fire!  And, being Brett, he wouldn’t even use any of the newspaper that was there.  :)

The girls and Orrin and I went for a little walk along the road.  It was a beautiful time of day, with the sun slanting down all golden.  Mmmm.  It was so beautiful.

Just looking at this picture makes me hungry.

They were perfect.  Nothing was undercooked, nothing was burned, and we were just the right amount of starving to appreciate them to the fullest!  I LOVE tin foil dinners!  (p.s. Brett’s face is really weird/scary in this picture because he had just put a bite in his mouth and it was hot so he was blowing it.  Ha ha weirdo.)  Every kid ate up every last bit.  Hazel was wishing we had brought a tent because she was “ready to curl up in a nice warm tent and go to bed.”  :)

The view of the mountains on the way home was wonderful.