Stowe VT Addendum

When I realized I had quite a few additional pictures from Stowe to share, then remembered another little story I wanted to include, I decided to stick it all into a new post.  So here's some fill-in-the-blanks from our trip north.

 The almost-vertical hike we took our first morning in Stowe, before exploring Smuggler's Cave.

The top part of Bingham Falls (the part that thankfully Sarah didn't go over).  We never made it to even see the lower portion of the falls, which I think had more vertical drop.

Brian's finished stone tower, a pretty impressive one if I do say so.  And I just noticed that in the upper right hand of the picture you can see towers made by some kids that were playing across the stream (they were inspired by Brian's example).

The kids and Brian also amused themselves by throwing rocks in the water to make big splashes.  I amused myself by shooting slow-shutter speed photos of said splashes.  I'm pretty sure this one was one of Brian's (larger) rocks)

Sarah's throwing is accompanied by yelling and this face... every time!

Brian and Nathan at Bingham, showing off some of their favorite rock finds.

The view from our condo balcony.  Lovely during the day plus one particularly beautiful sunset that Brian and I enjoyed after the kids were in bed.  This may or may not have prompted us to look at houses/land for sale in Maryville TN, since it made us think how nice it would be to end up with the Smokey Mountains in our backyard.

Some more pictures from our hike at the top of Mount Mansfield.

Another interesting part of our hike on the mountain was Nathan's observation that "We are so tall.  This mountain is taller then God!"  I'm not sure what prompted this line of thinking, but almost three weeks later Nathan's still making comments along these lines: "Boston is bigger then God.  The T tracks are longer then God.  The whole world is wider then God!"  We started then and are continuing to talk with him about God being bigger then everything - God made everything and he's bigger then everything too.  I've told him that sometime these things are hard for us to think about and understand, so we will just continue to discuss.  But I wanted to remember that on top of this (admittedly very high) mountain was the first time Nathan began exploring thoughts along these lines.

The kids LOVED toasting marshmallows two of the nights at the condo.  Unfortunately we never got the fire started early enough to let it die down into coals, so we were roasting in the dancing flames both times!

The view of Mount Mansfield from near our condo.  For our hike on Sunday morning, we parked near the hump on the left where the cell towers are (just to the right of the base), then we hiked over the first and second little lumps on the ridge.  The second, pointier hump was where we had our picnic and turned around. We decided not to try and ascent the taller summit on the right of the photo (obscured slightly by the clouds).

The dam after a second day's work.  Neither kid wanted to pose with Daddy this time, but I was impressed with how hard this guy and the kids worked to build this structure.