Sea Caves

We spent Valentine's Day as a family today and decided to go to the sea caves to celebrate! Of course, on the way we stopped at the new Arby's in town as well :) It was a long drive and a long walk but the kids had so much fun exploring the lakeshore and slip-sliding on the ice! Some of the pictures are pretty neat but it was hard to capture the whole experience ... it was really beautiful and I'm so glad we went!

I think Madeline was a little worried that this was the extent of the caves :) She was climbing under any jutting rock she could find!!

She was also climbing on EVERYTHING!! It made our walk much longer to have to wait for her climbing on all the uneven surfaces on the lake. For a while all we heard from her and Ben was "Ouch, I fell ... I'm okay"!

After a while I think Benny was falling on purpose ... he likes to eat the snow and kept trying to lick the snow on the ice.

This was the only cave I was able to go in ... I was carrying Annalise in a front pack and it made crawling difficult :)

Aaron and Maddy crawled their way into this little opening and found a sort of cavern inside ... Madeline love it but Benny was too scared to go in ... he thought it might be dark :)

This was the most beautiful part of the hike but the picture doesn't do it justice. It was difficult to climb up to the entrance to the cave so Aaron hoisted Maddy up to get a closer look for us. On top of the tall sheet of ice was a slight downslope towards a crack in the rocks where there was a cave. It was deeply set into the shoreline and was really neat.

Again, Benny chose just to watch because he was a little scared. Come to think of it ... aside from the walking pretty much everything scared him! He wouldn't even accept a ride in the sled because he thought Aaron was pulling it too fast!! Unfortunately, because he did a lot of waiting while Maddy explored, he got cold and uncomfortable pretty quick!

The dripping ice formed stalagtite looking icicles from the tops of the rocks.

Until the end, when she got really cold, Madeline had a fun day and really was a trooper about trying all the new things. People watching her climb and explore were impressed with her enthusiasm :)

After the two mile hike and lots of climbing and sliding the kids were EXHAUSTED and fell asleep in the car. Benny only took about one mile out of town to fall asleep and Madeline was soon after!

Happy Valentine's Day Everyone!!