Higher Elevations

It had been awhile since we went on a spur of the moment adventure trip, so today that's just what we did. We headed off to the highest point in Florida, also commonly known as Britton Hill. It was about an hour and a half drive to get there and Alex thought it would be fun to cry most of the way, but other than that and some bad directions from Map Quest we managed to get there OK. So here it is folks, the highest point in Florida:


Now in case you can't read the small print let me show you just how high we were:

Our noses were bleeding, the air was hard to breathe...OK not really. Actually, the highest point in Florida is the lowest highest point of all the states. Now if you want to get technical this granite marker was really the highest spot:

It just wasn't as cool looking as the big sign. Ella did her best to be impressed but really didn't care. Alex was so unimpressed. He was much more interested in the airplanes flying over:

There was a series of trails in the park so we decided to head out for a little hike. It was a beautiful cool day and the hike was through a nice green forest (note the fact that everything is still green at the end of October!) free of visible large arachnid life.

The kids were having a great time running around playing in the woods. We let Ella have free reign of the old camera and she was snapping pictures like a pro:

What a cutie! The kids were making all sorts of discoveries. They had never seen moss before and were really entranced by it.

They sat there stroking this patch of moss for quite a while. Alex came up at one point carrying this odd piece of moss:

It was spongy and covered sections of the forest floor:

He like ripping it apart. He also was loving the acorns all over the place. Of course I wasn't loving him loving them because his way of loving them was like this:

Yes. That is an acorn in his mouth. He likes to chew on them. I'm going to get all his teeth pulled so he has nothing to chew with.

Ella is loving having a little brother right now. I'm sure this will change sometime soon, but she always holds his hand when we are walking around:

She'll stroll along singing "We are a Happy Family" which is so cute. Except of course when we are in the grocery store and she's singing it at the top of her lungs over and over and over....you get the picture.

There was a lot of green and brown on this hike, but I made it a point to hunt down whatever color I could. And this proved to be easier than I thought thanks to the fact that it seems to be fungus season in the forest. This one here was my favorite:

It was a good foot across. Huge! And bright orange. So fun! But I managed to find something in almost every color of the rainbow.

Red:

(Not a fungus, I know, but red nonetheless.)

Orange:

(I wish I'd gotten it dripping. Would've made a really cool picture.)

Yellow:

(More fungus!)

Green:

(That was one determined fungus to push up through that moss.)

Blue:

(Now which way were we supposed to go again?)

No purple, sadly. But I did get a cool brown:

(A feast for Alex.)

It was a lot of fun to wander the park and experience such high altitudes. And since we were already up there we decided to venture into Alabama for lunch. We stopped in Florala (Florida + Alabama, the real name, I kid you not) at the local Hardee's for some mediocre food. There was a really beautiful lake there though. Then another long, crying fest of a drive home. Good fun!

And on a side note. Anton went to the doctor this morning because his ribs have been hurting since he fell off his bike mountain biking last week. Nothing broken. Just badly bruised. Nothing a little Tylenol with codeine can't help.

Have a good day!