Cuyahoga Valley National Park

In the week between Christmas and New Year's, we decided to get an AirBnb in Cleveland and go visit Cuyahoga Valley National Park. This was a fun trip that lent itself to lots of other little forays rather than our usual hiking-and-camping-centric national parks trips!

We opted to drive through Dayton so that we could visit the US Air Force museum. It had a lot of really cool planes and rockets to see, and the members of our family who love that sort of thing were in total heaven (and everyone else was very patient). 



The first hike we did in Cuyahoga was Brandywine Falls. The interesting thing about this park is that it was established so late that the towns within it were already fully developed, and unlike, say, Great Smoky Mountains, the government didn't make people move out of the park. So the park encompasses a lot of existing infrastructure and you can basically drive anywhere in this very long stretched-out park that threads along the Cuyahoga River. 

Which is a very roundabout way of saying that we opted to hike 5 miles to see a waterfall that we could have driven right up to and parked 20 feet away, but...we were there to see more of the park. ;-)



We parked at the visitor's center and hiked along the Towpath Trail for awhile before hopping on the connector that went to the falls. In summer the Towpath is hopping (42 miles of crushed gravel, lots of bikers, runners, and pedestrians), but it was very quiet when we were there and I think we maybe saw 3 bikers and 10 runners the whole time we were in the park. 


And here are the falls!! My photo crops out the road at the top of the falls. It's very urban!

The trails around the gorge are pretty, but the rest of it was pretty blah. Mud and brown trees. 

I took a grand total of 3 pictures in five miles, if that tells you anything! But these kids are pretty cute. 

It started to rain pretty heavily just as we got back to the car, so it was the perfect time to drive to historic Kirtland and visit some of the sites that are key to the early history of our church. We last visited in 2010 (post here) so it was fun to go back with older children and more children!

One thing that was really fun was to look up our ancestors who lived in Kirtland: James Henry Rollins, Isaac Decker, and Harriet Page Wheeler Decker Young. 



The next day we headed out for more hiking--this was the hike that I was expecting to be the best, so we saved it for our second day. 



This hike is called Ledges and it's fairly short (we added on some loops and spurs so it was about 4 miles) but it was SO fun. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. 

I took a ton of pictures in this specific area because the kids found an interconnecting system of tunnels and spent a loooong time exploring around and crawling to see where the tunnels all went. 

Case in point: there is a tunnel that begins by Abigail and ends by Neil. 

You just have to climb down here to get in. Which to be honest I had zero interest in doing. I was happy to take pictures. 

Always nice to get a sibling assist, haha. 

I really love this pic!

The kids would happily have spent a week on the Ledges trail, but we had a few more sites we really wanted to see, so we went looking for a covered bridge (where we spent a long time skipping rocks--so many good ones!), the beaver pond (we saw a beaver's trail as he slipped under the water but he never resurfaced no matter how long we waited) and a lot of old locks and the cute town of Peninsula. 

The AirBnb pickings were pretty slim near to the park, so while we ended up with a place that had nice soft comfy beds and plenty of space, it was weirdly lacking in some amenities (towels! blinds! kitchen stuff!)

So while we had a great time playing games, we also did weird stuff like make salad in a trash bag. Oh well. 

Note: everyone was also super patient with me cramming workouts in trying to finish my holiday challenge (every Peloton holiday-themed class in every discipline from 2020 and 2021, which challenge I thought of sometime in the first week of December, so I fit in 79 classes in 27 days). More about that later, but I was pretty creative trying to smash them in, which led to things like yoga while also cooking breakfast. And HIIT cardio sessions after a day of hiking, which was the very absolute low point of the whole holiday challenge. 

On our last day after checking out of our AirBnb, we stopped in Columbus to visit COSI, which I remembered fondly from my childhood growing up in Ohio! It looked very very different, but we had a great time and again, could have spent many more hours there!

 All in all, it was a really fun four days with lots of different fun stuff to keep us occupied while we waited for New Year's Eve!

Sixteen

1) We were building with Magnatiles yesterday, and I was helping Luke with something and Nathan said, "Mommy! Look! I made a clock tower!" And so he had! (He popped out the tiny little clock I keep in the library from its housing and then figured out how to prop it on the sill of the tower so it would stay put.) He was SO proud of himself.

 

2) Luke and I spent quite awhile figuring out what kinds of bracing we needed to build a chair out of Tegu blocks that would support his weight. He was thrilled when we finally figured it out!

3) Loved watching Nathan and his friend reading together--neither of them can actually read, but Nathan would summarize the picture and then she would repeat it after him. They did this for quite awhile yesterday and it was so sweet!

 

4) We figured out a new (very amusing for us) way to entertain Matthew--he was loving watching the little car zoom around and around on these tracks, and it was a double bonus because it kept all the other kids fascinated as well!

5) And last but not least, my new treadmill belt came yesterday and my rockstar husband changed it out with the old one--so I was able to run 7 miles last night after the kids were in bed and all was well with the world. :-)