I hate to admit it, but I nearly forgot to post tonight. I’m afraid I don’t have any pictures to share as we were on the move all morning and didn’t take too many pictures. I wish we’d worn pedometers today as I think we put on several miles! We started the morning back at Quarry Hill where we did the Monarch tagging last week. There were two letterboxes there that we found. We were tickled to discover that our friends, the Beauchene’s, caught the letterboxing bug. They heard ab out it from our posts this week and called yesterday to get details about this “sport.” When we found both boxes today, they had beat us to the stamp! Fun! Our question for them is whether they took the “adventurous” hike to box #2 or the “easy” hike? They’ll have to post here and let us know!

After we recovered from the adventurous hike, we drank some water and opted to find a geocache treasure. We drove around to the other side of the park and left out car near a playground. This was the first geocache Kadi and I experienced. We ended up jumping over a creek to get to this box and after nearly breaking my neck … ankle … I refused to go back the same way. That might have been a mistake. After we found the Skippy jar with treasures, we began following a wider, mowed trail. However, after walking quite a ways we were getting concerned that it wasn’t going to take us back across the creek to our car. At one point I was about to set my foot down when something moved. It was a great big fox snake! I frankly didn’t care what kind of snake it was. I screamed and did a fancy little step that got my family’s attention. They had all passed the snake without realizing it. We had Gracie with us and I was a bit concerned that she’d go after it. Not so. My furry little friend could have cared less. Kadi on the other hand … well … she had already shared her rather strong feelings about a few spiders she’d seen. After we met up with the snake, she agreed to take spiders over snakes. I’m with her on that one. She just kept saying, “I want to go home. I want to go home.” Of course that only encouraged Ben (8). He pointed out several “snakes” to her as we navigated our way back to the van, which took a while I’m afraid. Next time we’ll jump the creek!

This afternoon my wonderful web designer came over and gave Mike a lesson on managing the site. I think we’ve created a monster! Mike loves this kind of thing and my site may look different all the time now! He’s like a kid in a candy store. Our TV has also been broken for the last 7 days (except for the one day when it miraculously came on so we could watch “7th Heaven”) and we had to be home this afternoon as the repairman was coming today. He wasn’t in the house more than 2 minutes before he said he had to take the insides out and take them back to the shop for the next 10 days … if we are lucky.

Tomorrow is MOA and ZOO day. Kadi will be posting. She’s more than a little excited!

Many of you know that I have been counting on this “Staycation” to be a time of refreshment and rest after a stressful summer. After our week, I will post more about some of the things I’ve been studying and wrestling with in the last few weeks. Tonight I want to share a verse with you that has touched my heart today.

The path of life leads upward for the wise; they leave the grave behind. Proverbs 15:24 (NLT)

I have an everlasting God who will not faint or grow weary. He is my strength. When I consider the parentheses He seems to have me residing in right now, the destiny He has for me is not here. It is a Kingdom destiny and I intend to keep my eyes fixed firmly on what He has set before me.