With my kids out of school now, I’ve had to try and plan some fun activities to keep my kids from getting bored for the summer. We decided that each day we would do an extra “work” activity (this has included things like setting up and cleaning out our pool, cleaning out the drawers and cupboards in each of the bathrooms, sorting through clothes drawers, etc) and then each day we do something fun. So you can get a rough idea of what we do, we plan a “Movie Day” – (either renting something from RedBox and watching it at home with popcorn, or going to the dollar movie theater), a “Park Day” – (discovering a new and different park each week in our neighborhood), a “Sports Day” – (taking the kids somewhere to do a sport, like tennis, badmitton, frisbee golf, volleyball, swimming, etc), a “Library and Craft Day” – (we make a trip to the library, and I have one of my children in charge of organizing a craft for the others), and a special “trip” day.
Last week I decided for our “trip” day, that I would take the kids on a hike. I picked a short trail that one of my daughters had gone on for a young women’s activity. She told us there was a beautiful waterfall at the end of the hike.
We drove to a little parking lot that was near the bottom of the trail. At the very beginning was a huge staircase that seemed to go on forever. There was some greenery at times, but most of it was uncovered, and my legs hurt a little bit even as we started going up. I was a little worried that this might be too difficult of a hike for my little ones.
Once we got to the top of the stairway, we found ourselves back in a residential area where the road continued to go uphill, but not as steeply. (They just didn’t want visitors parking on their streets…) We continued walked upwords along the road until finally we found the trail marker that again led us back to the designated path. Stairs were again part of the trail, but there wasn’t so many, and it quickly turned into a nice wooded terrain. Further on, the landscape changed a bit to rocky, and the kids discovered some neat caves and rock formations. As we continued up the steep path, we marveled at the beauty around us. Finally at the top, was a beautiful waterfall.
We had a lot of fun, some of us wished our hike had been a little longer. It was only about a ¼ of a mile!
Reflecting on the journey, it’s easy to see how our hike was a lot like our journey in life. Sometimes it seems like we’re faced with steep stairways that lead upwords, and we wonder if we’ll make it through. Sometimes we are on a plateau, back in familiar territory but wondering where to find our path again.
I love it when I know I’m on the path. It was fun to get to the part where I could hear the water and I knew we were close. The waterfall was beautiful. It was worth all the pain and effort to get there. I wonder if maybe when we get to the other side, if we’ll think about this road of life and talk about how short it was. I’m sure that we’ll get there and say how worth it everything was!