Chaudiere River and Pool

On March 6th, I took my 5 little kids and Linda on a trip to the other side of the island. I gave us all (except Linda) anti-motion sickness pills before we left hoping it would help and it did so we started off great. When we finally arrived at the trail head (after a very bumpy road into the mountains) I miss read the sign (although it is actually very clear) and thought it was only 268 ft to the pool. In reality it was 2,684 feet so you can imagine my surprise when we kept walking and walking, climbing up and down on the muddy trail. Oh well. It was certainly beautiful and my kids loved being outside and they probably didn't even notice the mud. I never saw them because other people in our group took care of them since I had Kemiah on my back - I guess they figured I had enough of a load to worry about. I made up a little song as I went along, "Look up. Look down. Look all around. Don't miss a thing." Of course, there is nothing like being there but the pictures at least let you pretend like you were there. The water was cool... okay it was almost cold and the river was swift so the kids had to stick to the edge if they wanted to get in. Ben did decide to go down the waterfall slide with a friend of ours so he put on his floaties and he was off. The one thing no one told us was to expect the water to push you down - which seems obvious now but no one thought of it before. Ben went down fine and popped up quickly. But when someone went out to help him they got pulled under and that caused him to go too. Luckily everyone came up but Ben didn't want to do the slide anymore. I eventually put the camera away and went to the cliff and jumped in. My new motto: It's all for the blog. Some of the people below were video taping it so that we (all the girls have blogs) could have live footage. (I'll put that in it's own post when I get it and figure out how to do such a thing.) Tamara went too so she has some good pictures (Stephen and Tamara on my friends list) and live footage. I ended up not going down the slide and, of course, the minute I got dressed and put Kemiah on my back I thought to myself, "you should have done that because you'll probably never come back again." Good thing it has no bearing on my eternal progression. Anyway, we hiked back and everyone decided to take the more direct route back to the vans. Wow, it was almost straight up the mountain side. And did I mention it was muddy? I can see why they don't take you down that way because you'd probably end up sliding down on your bottom the entire way, if you're lucky. We all made up and are the better for it - at least we can say that now. It was a nice trip, even if it wasn't what I expected... have I said that before? On with the pictures...

Just a neat view in the forest.

A big leaf on the muddy trail. Everyone took a picture of it.

A view looking up...

A view looking down... strange fungus.

A waterfall/stream we had to cross to get to the pool and cliff.

Looking up stream.

Looking up river to the pool, slide and cliff.

Looking down the slide.

Looking over the edge of the cliff into the bubbly water.

This is Nick and Matt on the other side getting ready to jump from that cliff. They just had to do it all.

Ben and Natalynn Hepworth at the top of the slide.

Ben and Natalynn in the middle of the slide.
Ben floating at the surface before he went under again.

Xiomara painting the rocks with water and a palm frawn.

My three oldest hitched a ride on Tamara's back to get to the rocks on the other side. Then they kept her busy with all their exploring. Thanks Tamara.

Marissa found a neat flower that looked like it was made out of wax.

Here's the view on the way back from the pool.

We had a really good time and the kids were real troopers. I didn't hear them complain at all and they just kept going. I was at the back of the line, taking my time, so when I made it to the van the first thing everyone said was how great my kids are. They even mentioned that Marissa was leading the pack. It was great and I'm so glad I can share these things with them. They are hard workers and fun to be with. We ate lots of peanut butter and jam sandwiches on the way home.

I thought I would go ahead and add a picture that some of my friends posted because I don't have any others of her.... Here's Kemiah:

I left her in the carrier because I knew I didn't want to try and keep track of her while I tried to take pictures and swim. She was fine until it tipped over and she ended up in water. I think it scared her more than anything but by this time it was lunch time and she hadn't had a nap yet so she wasn't happy and I had to come down from taking pictures to console her and, of course, I couldn't do anything without her getting mad at me because I wasn't picking her up. Oh, and my clothes were on top of the carrier so when it fell over my clothes got soaking wet. Oh well.

Here's a picture that I like of Angelique, our neighbors daughter. She's such a sweet, happy baby and I loved the waterfall slide in the background.

I also wanted to mention that I took 200+ pictures of this trip. I took more than that but had to delete some that I knew were bad because my card was full and that was the only way I could take more. I had forgotten to empty the card from Ben's birthday the day before. Oops.