The drive was interesting. A lot of it went through rural Georgia. We did drive through Elberton, which claims to produce more granite products than anywhere else in the world. There are monuments everywhere, and along the road you can see all the big warehouses where they cut the stone and the railroads where they bring in the granite. It seemed like a tiny little town, but I looked up populations and it's actually bigger than Kimberly, Idaho. I guess the difference is that if you live in Kimberly you're fifteen minutes away from Twin Falls, whereas Elberton is the big town in the area.
We left early enough that we got to our camp site in time to have a slightly late lunch.
Once we had the camp set up and had eaten lunch, we hiked the loop to Juney Whank Falls.
There were lots of little purple butterflies fluttering along the trail, and it was quite magical to the girls.
We stopped to check out this waterfall (Tom Branch Falls) and explore the creek a bit before going back to our campsite for dinner.
We roasted hot dogs for dinner. We just grabbed some buns and hot dogs from the freezer before we left since this was so last minute, although I think this was actually the first time we've cooked on a camping trip.
I think everyone slept okay. It was kind of cold. I usually wake up a lot when I'm camping. The kids slept all night without a peep.
We had sausage for breakfast, also grabbed from our freezer. Here's proof.
We were able to get some better pictures of Tom Branch Falls with the morning light.
A lot of people were renting tubes and floating down the river, so we had fun stopping sometimes to watch.
Heidi really wanted to go out to this rock. It was tricky because the rocks were smooth, so it was easy to slip.
These pretty lilies were growing on the hill all along the trail (so was poison ivy, which I'm pretty good at recognizing now).
The trail up to Indian Creek Falls was about a mile uphill. The kids made it. Ann Marie got a few piggy back rides. It was a very nice hike. It was nice and shady and not very hot, and there was some great scenery.
Ann Marie really wanted to climb up the rocks like Kevin and Heidi had, so Ryan helped her.
We walked a little farther up to see the waterfall from the top. Kevin wandered into the foliage a little bit and tripped and twisted his ankle when Ryan yelled at him that he was walking right into some poison ivy, so he limped a bit on the way back down. We stopped to watch people fall off their tubes going down some rapids.
We parked in the picnic area to have more peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, amidst much weeping and wailing on the part of the girls because there were gnats flying around their heads. Then we drove home. The kids really wanted to stop somewhere to get dinner, but being in all the rural areas there weren't a lot of options, so we ended up getting Papa John's when we got home.
Then it was time to get ready for our Utah trip!
