Adventures in the Park

On Memorial Day, we visited Dan Nicholas Park. It's only about a 30 minute drive from where we live, but I never knew it existed until last week when a friend asked if we wanted to go with them. What a beautiful place!!

We took a picnic lunch and then headed out to do the paddle boats. After "accidentally" playing bumper boats with them a few times, we finally became pros at steering them.. right when we had to take them back to the dock. Casey and her friend Michele were soaked to the core. Michele kept steering them under a waterfall and Casey's cell phone was wet, but thankfully not ruined. Jason decided he wanted to see if he could catch one of the geese on the lake.. I think that's what it was, but it could have been some other flipper water bird.. I can't tell them apart. So he starts paddling as fast as he can towards this poor thing and it's swimming as fast as IT can to get away from us. It finally looks back at us and gives us this horrible barking sound and we busted out laughing. Our friends saw all of this from across the lake and gave Jason a hard time about it, jokingly of course. I was afraid someone would call the humane society on us.. haha!

Anyway, we get off the paddle boats and head towards the train. We are thinking it's a big diesel train like they have at Tweetsie Railroad, but we get up to the place to pay for it and find out it's only $1 to ride. We were like.. "Wow, what a deal!!", so we go around the building to board the train and see that it's this tiny almost toddler size train (I guess I should have paid attention to the website). We all start laughing. Then we squeeeeeze into the train and around we go hoping to see some wildlife or other fun attraction. We go through a tunnel and see displays of dolls in 1800s costumes.. the conductor tells us about them, and then we go through another tunnel that features stuffed animals supposedly in a circus. We stop again as he tells us about it. We then realize that unless you have a child 5 years old or younger, you shouldn't go on the train at Dan Nicholas Park, but hey we were only out $1 each for it.

When we got back to our picnic area, we all became fascinated with the millions of ants that had found their way to the few potato chips on the ground. We literally watched them for about 30 minutes as more joined in the feast, and they carried pieces away to their ant hill. (They really can carry 10 to 20 times their body weight )

We ended the day with a carousel ride and a stroll around the lake. It was perfect weather, and just an awesome day all around.

Ahhhh... the simple things in life!!!!!!!!!