hemlock crossing

so, after church this morning, annie and i decided to have a picnic out at hemlock crossing. well... we just got jimmy john's to go and ate it part way down the trail. if you've never been to hemlock crossing, YOU NEED TO GO! it is such a nice place and they had the grand opening of a nature center/building there about a week ago, but i'll talk more about that later.
we got to the park and headed right out on the trail. just as you start your hike, you cross over the pigeon river (oh there is also a boat launch for kayaks and canoes... awesome).


we saw a few people out on the river kayaking and canoeing. that is definitely something we hope to do a lot of this summer. the river is very windy there and the whole area altogether is somewhat wet and swampy, but in a good way.


there is one spot that we saw a couple of weeks ago when we were there, and so i decided to take a picture of it. its a natural spring. its really cool because this water just comes up out of the ground at the base of this tree and flows out. that's crazy to me... God is soooo cool for designing things like that.


so we eventually found a nice overlook to sit and eat our jimmy john's. this is when we saw most of the people canoeing and kayaking. a few of the canoes had dogs in with them too. we cant wait to get a house so we can have a dog... apartment living just isn't for huskies.


anyway, there was a cool tree that hung over the river so i went out a little ways on it. i was definitely nervous of falling in though, pretty sure it would have hurt seeing as i dont think it was too deep there, and i didnt really feel like injuring myself if i fell in.


well, we continued on the trail and saw lots of cool things... we stopped at a couple of marshy pond areas looking for frog eggs, but with no luck. we decided to hike the whole way to the end and then back. we had been talking about hiking out at pine bend (where we were supposed to get married, but it rained), and not 5 minutes after we were talking about it, we were at pine bend! it was pretty crazy because we never really realized that the two parks were connected by trails.


so after walking around pine bend park a little bit, we hiked back to hemlock crossing and went into the new nature center building. it was amazing inside there. they built the majority of the building with stuff within a 100yd radius of the building... meaning like the wood and stuff like that. it is heated and cooled using geothermal energy, and has some really nice exhibits to learn about the natural habitat of the river and nearby ponds. very cool place to go, especially with young kids. we even got some info to see if they were hiring for part-time summer work, because i can really see annie enjoying/being good at a job like that.