Fun Stuff Always Happens When I don't Have the Camera

The other day we all hopped in the van and headed down to Taylor to check out the Peace River Campground (or something along those lines). It has a great playground that we could see from the highway and Hubby wanted to check out the boat launch. The kids had fun playing at the playground for a while but there weren't any OTHER kids so the playground fun didn't last too long so we headed down to the river.

The rivers up here are not lined with rocks like the rivers I am used to, they are lined with dirt - or more specifically... mud. The slipperiest, gooiest mud you can imagine. On this particular day the river was quite low - we found out later it was because they slowed the flow at the dam to look for a body... ewww.

Anyway, walking down the river bank is fun on its own as at any particular moment you could slip and fall in the muck. However, once you embrace the fact that you are going to be dirty and let yourself sink up to your ankles (knees sometimes) and just go with it, you don't seem to fall so much.

So we were walking along, checking out various animal footprints... pretty sure we saw wolf, maybe some sort of large cat, beaver maybe, raccoon, squirrel and a bunch of dogs... We played in the mud, squished it in our toes, crossed a small creek then crossed another to a larger, steeper, mud bank. By this point the kids were swimming, it was just deep enough to cover their heads in the middle but they could touch most of the places and then they were playing in a mud puddle that was warmed in the sun... which led to the making of a "river" down from the puddle to the actual river... which led to the "otter-slide"

Maria loves to play in the dirt and it took not long at all for her to try sliding down the bank into the river, but it wasn't very fast moving here and the mud was a little bit hard, so she moved on to the next slide site, better but still not fast enough so we all built the third slide further down in the softest glop you could imagine and she slid much better here, but she wasn't running at it so Hubby had to show her how it was done of course and they had such a blast. Allan doesn't like to get dirty so he rode down it on Hubby's back but Maria was in her glory... She was covered in mud from just below her eyes and all the way down. I wish I had my camera, but honestly it would have gotten in the way, we had too much fun.