Shenandoah Park (It's an Annual Thing)

We did it again!  We drove up to Shenandoah National Park on Friday with Nana and missed the changing of the leaves.

Awesome.

Since we have decided to make missing the changing of the leaves our tradition, we can definitely count this trip as a success.  In case you are wondering, below is what the NPS website called 70-90% peak leaf changing.

My grasp of numbers isn't really strong, but, yeah, I don't think so.

But our other tradition is to have fun no matter what the trees look like and we succeeded there, too.  In fact, Josh gave the trip "two thumbs up."

Our resident mountain goat did his usual scampering.

And Michael is definitely developing some bouldering skills as well.  For some reason, I am comfortable with Josh risking life and limb on the rocks, but when Michael gets up there my stomach drops.  I guess Josh has been doing it for long enough that I think he knows when he is doing.  Michael makes all sorts of gasps and grunts as he climbs and each of them worries me.  Plus, with the boot on, I am not exactly really able to rescue him easily.

But I tried not to undermine his confidence by saying "be careful" more than once every 30 seconds or so and he did just fine.

The weather was gorgeous (ie chilly) and we did a little bit of hiking (ie Irene gimping up the mountain and then telling everyone we had to go back to the car soon).  We had a lovely time and we really enjoy spending this time with Nana.

Here are my attempts to take nice pictures of the boys: