Route of the Hiawatha

This is a little old news, but newsworthy all the same. A few weeks ago we met up again with the Prestwich's for a camping/biking adventure in Northern Idaho. We actually camped near a tiny town called Avery, which is just past St. Maries, ID. It is a logging community, so their school mascot is a lumberjack. Jeff really gets a kick out of this guy at the high school. I would feel bad not including since Jeff took such pains to really capture his tree-chopping essence...

When we started looking through the three possible campgrounds for a spot for our group, we were starting go get worried that so many spots were taken already, in spite of it being a Wednesday. Luckily there was one spot left, and it was literally the best spot out of the entire area. We had tons of trees and shade, space for a large tent and a camp trailer, trails for the kids to explore, trails to the river for fishing and playing and even huckleberry bushes!

Here's Dave, AKA the pied piper. He had all the kids entranced watching him make a whistle out of a willow.
That's all of our group walking along the St. Joe River. Isn't it so beautiful!? Dave and Jeff are in the waders in the water, and Jeff just caught a fish. He's such a good provider...wait, it's catch and release... oh well, I wasn't thrilled about cleaning them anyway...

One of the days of the campout was set aside for the Route of the Hiawatha. It was such a cool family activity. It is an old railway that has since been converted to a bike trail. It is about 15 miles long and the entire route is on a gentle downhill grade with a shuttle at the base. It is in beautiful mountains and you go over huge trestle bridges and several long, dark tunnels.

Here I am at the trailhead, a tunnel that is just under 2 miles long and dark and muddy and even a little chilly in the deepest part. It was a little eerie at first. You would be in touble without a decent headlamp. I have the girls in the trailer behind me, and they serenaded me the entire tunnel with "Mud, mud, glorious mud, nothing's quite like it for cooling the blood"...that helped, a lot...

One of the bridges we crossed.

At the end. I was hoping for a group shot, but everyone was a little tired and grouchy and wanted to run around. These were the only troopers willing to work with me, and two of them had no real choice. That's Jackson in the middle of my girls, he and Regan became quite the BFF's.

Alas, not everything can go as planned however...