Edwards Haps and Mishaps

We just said good-bye to Shaun’s brother and his cute girlfriend, Becca. They came to visit us, which we love visitors (hint to any of our distant friends and family…..) so it was fun to hang out with them and show them some of our favorite spots. I’m sure I’ve post on here before about the “Newt Trail.” It’s actually called Independence Trail, and it is in Nevada City. up in the Sierras. When we were younger we’d always take this hike and there is one point where you get to this cascading creek and if you go at the right time of year, it is full of little orange newts. We go almost every year with our kids, and apparently we have gone at the wrong time because there have never been newts! Shaun just thought I called it that……just because? I was bound to let me kids play with the newts this year, so we went early and took Taylor and Becca. Well, bummer for us, we drove the hour to get there and then we saw caution tape! The west trail was closed (which is the one we take) due to a sink hole! Up in that area, during the gold rush times, there were lots and lots of mines and so now these sink holes happen when the earth just sinks into one of these mines! That kind of freaks me out, and I wouldn’t want to chance sinking into some bottomless pit.

Luckily, there is an East trail (why did i never know that?) and so we went along that. There were some really neat bridges and walkways where you felt like Swiss Family Robinson or some secret jungle tree house, but there wasn’t really an exciting thing at the end. We found a picnic table and ate some snacks! That was the end for us!

After we finished our pretty hike, Preston and Ada had swim lessons where Preston got a ribbon for swimming across the whole pool and his teacher said he’s never seen someone progress so quickly! We’ve been trying to get him to learn to swim for years now. I knew he could do it quickly if one of us wasn’t teaching him and he really has learned SO fast! I am proud :) Ada just started, and I know she’ll do awesome too!

I don’t really have other pictures from the weekend but we tried to cram in a quite a few things and now I need a nap :) Thanks Taylor and Becca for coming out! And thanks for leaving the cookies (Becca makes some amazing PB cookies) and for all the playing and fun! The kids kept asking where they were when we got out of church, like they should be waiting in the car for us.