Adventures During this Beautiful Weekend

During the cold, winter months my Husband and I stay in the house a lot.  Neither of us enjoys the cold weather, so when decent weather arrives, we take every advantage of the chance to get rid of the cabin fever.  This weekend, we had WONDERFUL weather here....sunny, about 70 degrees.  We broke out the adventure backpack for both Saturday and Sunday.  The adventure backpack?  That's our name for the backpack we use to carry into the wilderness for our adventures....hiking, biking, boating, etc.  The adventure backpack holds basic survival stuff (hey, don't laugh...we've watched too many shows about being lost in the wilderness), binoculars, trail maps, water, camera, etc. 

On Saturday, the adventure of the day was mountain biking!  I love mountain biking....it's really challenging, but so much fun.  There's also an element of risk and thrill involved.  Especially when my Husband is in the front, and I'm trying to keep up.  He absolutely flies over rocks and roots and ravines at a veritable speed of light, while I'm in the back trying to keep up muttering 4-letter words under my breath, convinced I'm about to do a face-plant into a tree.  But I'm also laughing the whole way, getting an adrenaline rush, and enjoying the journey.  Here's a photo of our mountain bike trail by the lake:

Beautiful, huh?  Trust me, the trail looks easy in this photo, but there's more parts of it that's rocky, rooty, steep, and narrow.  We stopped half-way  for a much-needed water break, and I snapped a quick photo of us:

Love the helmets?  :)  Mine has pink flames, lol.  I love how my handsome Hubby can rock a dorky-looking bicycle helmet.  We managed to finish the trail with only a few bruises, but a whole lot of fun. 
Here's me at the end of the trail:

Forgive my sweatshirt, bandana, totally-exhausted look.  :)  We wandered down by the lake to finish our water and relax for a bit.  What a great day we had. 

On to Sunday.  The Sunday adventure was the first hike of the year, with our two dogs.  Now our dogs are not the typical hiking dogs.  We have a min pin and a daschund.  LOL, we have ankle biters, but we take them hiking....in ruffly harnesses. 

We chose a relatively easy trail, 'cuz we were a little sore from the biking.  Our min pin lead the way:

Can you see our min pin in the picture?  Notice, if you can, the pink ruffly harness.  Complete cuteness!

Here's another picture of complete cuteness....Dixie, our daschund, with her own ruffly harness:

The dogs really had fun.  And so did we.  :)  Here's my Hubby during one of our rest stops:

Notice the adventure backpack??  Anyways, we hiked on a bit, and Dixie got tired.  She decided that the trail was a good place for a nap:

She takes advantage of every stop to take a rest.  :)  The vet says she needs to lose a little weight, so I guess I understand.  But when we start moving, she's ready to go again.  You'll notice I don't have a lot of photos of our min pin, Pepper.  The problem is she wouldn't sit or stand still long enough to snap her picture.  She doesn't take as many rest stops as Dixie.  I did manage to get some wonderful scenery pictures:

I have no idea what these little plants are, but I think they are gorgeous, and so so green!  It's a tangible piece of evidence that Spring is upon us.  Next photo is the waterfall over the dam:

It's a beautiful place for a picnic lunch.  But we were ready to head on home, so we hiked on out of the trail.  Dixie was more than ready to go home, as you can see from the picture below:

lol, She was definitely tired, as we all were.

All in all, we have had a super weekend full of adventures.  Tonight, I had some oil paint leftover from the painting I shared recently, so I painted this:

It's nothing really frame-worthy, but it was nice to practice and use up paint that would have otherwise dried up or gone unused. 

It's been a full weekend, and I'm definitely headed to bed early tonight.  Hope you all have a great week ahead!

-Joy