Hallow's Eve, 2019!

It's Halloween again...

I can't say much exciting about it as I don't care for it much at all.  That's a bit odd since I LOVE the season of Fall and I get geeky about cooking Thanksgiving dinner.  I love the Octoberfest beers for their sweet malty-ness.  I love the temperatures.  I love the smell of crops being harvested.

But halloween?  Nope. 

Haven't cared for it since my buddies and I stopped dressing up as KISS and going out long after we shouldn't have been!

After we had kiddos, my sister Doris and her husband Frank would come over and carve jack-o-lanterns with the boys.  Since Frank passed in 2014, I think we may have, maybe... carved pumpkins one time.

Enough sadness, lets have some fun with pictures!

Sam threatening to cut Caleb's head off with Jonah victorious in the foreground!

Sam, Caleb, Zoe, Jonah and my sister Dianne.

My lovely sis!

HEY! Turkey!!!

This couple was peering in our walkout door tonight!  They apparently do not realize how close we are to Thanksgiving dinner!!

Steve and Other Beauties!

I have nothing to add to the beauty of this!

Wednesday Night Fun

Most Wednesday nights for our boys are spent up at our chuch, Lutheran Church of the Cross in Altoona, Ia for youth night.  This past Wednesday had a bit of a different flare for Caleb.  Our neighbors had a church event for their congregation out at Center Grove Pumpkin Patch and asked if Calebber would like to tag along.  He would like and did like to!  This is a pic of him with their son Tobin.  I'm loving the smiles!

The Colors of Fall!

The picture does it NO justice, but these tree's along MLK Pkwy in Downtown Des Moines are stunning right now.  The depth of color in them is nothing shy of amazing!

2019 Mini-Vaca2, Eastern Iowa, Pt 7 - Palisades-Kepler State Park

So here's the final post. It's our final stop before returning home.

I have been in Cedar Rapids and the surrounding area many, many times but had never heard of this particular state park!  Again, a friend on Facebook came thru!!

Even tho we didn't explore much of the park, it provided the perfect place, about half way home, to get out, stretch our legs and do other things that human's trapped in vehicles for long periods of time need to do!

I don't have many comments at this point, but some lovely pictures of our short'ish hike.

This makes me wonder what was originally designed to be here?  Looks like a dam of some sort, but pretty friggin' messy too!

BIG fish!

There were a few things like this that were cool artifacts of the trails in days gone by!

This little lovely!!!

The End Of Football... *sigh*

Football ended today and while I'm glad for that due to sitting on bleachers with a bad back and then adding crappy weather in as well.  However, Caleb's team was just starting to gel and really put together some nice things.  I wish they could continue to build on those things!  This shot was after the O/T win on 4th down.  I felt bad for the team in white as we had experienced similar heartbreak last Tuesday night.

After a O/T win, the boys were trying to give the coach a "gatorade soak" after a win that was as wonderful today as the loss was heartbreaking last Tuesday night.  The boys were elated!!!

Caleb had to come out of the game after running the ball on 3rd down in overtime.  He was being tackled by one dude, when a 2nd dude came in to seal the deal and ended up with a hard knee into his back.  He wasn't feeling so good, but that's football.

Herding very excited cats!!

Trying to hold it together...

Holding it together, albeit still failing to fully focus (mostly Caleb).

Holding it together but the QB giving the victory sign...

...and finally.  A good shot.

And shortly thereafter, chaos!!!!  LOL!

What a fun (and too short) season!!  I LOVED LOVED LOVED Caleb's coaches, Felix and Joe, as they were very encouraging, upbeat but would still chew butt needed.

Overall a very fun season and with the exception of roughly two or three plays, could have been very different, but, that's football!

2019 Mini-Vaca2, Eastern Iowa, Pt 6 - Maquoketa Caves,pt III

We're just about to wrap this bad boy up.

After our brief lunch and inhalation of liquids, we set out to further explore the area of the park that we didn't give much respect to on our previous visit.

So let's got take a look.

Starting up the stairs and looking back down towards the road, parking lot, and ranger station.

Me fams up ahead as I was stopping to take pictures.

We didn't go down into this cave, however, we did meet a little boy at the entrance of it who will figure into our story later.  Apparently, his dad and his little sister were down in there at the time and he didn't want to go.

This is roughly where we start losing the path.  We were thinking that with the storm that had recently passed thru,  the path/trail was not so prominent anymore and we were sort of going where we thought it should be.  We hit a few dead ends...

This is looking mostly straight down about 200 ft.

Notice the steep drop on the left side of the pic.

The trail was getting pretty dicey at this point.

We were becoming tree-huggers the further we went!

Toothpicks for all!!

So we reached what we thought was a wicked dead-end.  This is a bit after the boy that we saw at the tiny cave entrance, his dad and little sister caught up to us.  I thought we had to head back up as I saw a fence in the chest high weeds we were walking thru, however, I didn't go close enough to investigate.  The fence went right up to the "path" but then ended.  So the two families hiked together for the next hour or so.  He was in much better shape than I so it required me to step it up a bit to "stay in the game".

On our way up to what turned out to be a pasture...

The best shot of us all together.

Crossing a creek!  These were a bit interesting.

We witnessed a deer doing some major escape move shortly before seeing these prints in the mud.  The deer, to its credit, went up one the steepest hills that I've ever seen an animal ascend.

Recent washout from the storm.

And finally, we reached the end of our hikes.

What a great adventure!  If you have kids, I would HIGHLY recommend Maquoketa Caves State Park as a destination!  It doesn't suck that the Bluff Lake Catfish Farm is 2 minutes away either!