On Monday of this week I decided to take Jacob and Michael to the gorge.  Anthony stayed home to go to banjo lessons which he ended up not going to anyway.  The weather was okay, warmer than it had been for a while.  Tuesday was suppose to be really nice, around 70 degrees but it was suppose to rain Monday afternoon and keep raining most of the night.  So I thought lets go on Monday, try to beat the rain and the mud that would be there on Tuesday.  We got a little bit of a later start than I wanted but we headed on out anyway. 

 

We went through Nada Tunnel and it had ice hanging along the end of the tunnel.  I bet it was awesome before most of it melted.  There was so much ice on our drive to the education center.  I took lots of pictures of it and we deemed it ice cycle day.  I forgot my map so we stopped by the educational center to pick another one up.  Then we had a nice conversation with two of the forest rangers there.  They gave Jacob lots of ideas about things to do to help his chances of actually being hired by the federal park system. 

 

We went on one of our favorite hikes, Sky Bridge.  We took Diesel with us, he loves hiking :)  We thought we might take the trail backwards this time and start by going down the 4 flights of stairs at the beginning instead of going up them at the end of the hike.  Well, that didn't go so well because the stairs of made of mesh metal and Diesel would NOT go down them.  We have taken him on this hike several times before and had not problem getting him to go up the steps.  But he was adamant about not going down them, to the point of almost pulling me over.  And he was doing this by backing up!!!  He is one strong dog!  So we went the other way ;)  About 3/4th through our hike it started raining on us, just a little though.  So we rushed through the rest of the trail.  We got back to the van before the heavy rain started.  On the way back we stopped at the Silver Dollar camp sites.  We saw some wild turkeys and the rain had made the river foggy and it looked really cool.  I remembered that there was a great place there to take pictures of the Red River. 

 

The boys were starving buy the time we got back out of the gorge.  We were all excited to head to Miguels Pizza, but when we got there it wasn't open.  We ended up at Subway, the only other place open around there this time of the year.  Jacob and Michael both got 6 inch sandwiches and after they finished them I had to get them each another one!!  Michael ate every bite of his, Jacob finished all but the end with mostly just bread.  We took that and gave it to Diesel. 

 

Even with the rain we had a wonderful day.  I love the gorge.  Its one of our favorite places here in Kentucky.  So glad we went because 2 days later the temps dropped majorly.  Yesterday (Friday) it didn't get above freezing all day.  Looking forward to another nice winter day so we can head back.