Thanksgiving recap!

Hi there all!

Hope you had fantastic Thanksgivings this year!

Dan and I left Thanksgiving morning to go camping up at DeSoto State Park.  It's about 2.5 hours NE from us at the foothills of the Appalachian mountain range:

The geography there is much different than where we live - it's heavily forested with smatterings of pines, mountainous (well, for the east), exposed rocks, and all in all super pretty.  It doesn't look much like what I think of when I think Alabama, but I should!

We had a nice leisurely drive up to the area and I think we avoided most of the holiday traffic.  After taking in a few sights, we hiked into our Backcountry site with Hannah in tow (carrying her own food, blanket, food dish, and a few other things we couldn't find room for on our own packs!).  We got in around 2pm or so, with just a few hours of daylight to setup camp and collect from the plentiful downed wood available for an epic-long campfire.  It had rained a couple days earlier which made the wood fairly smoky to burn, but a slight breeze kept it out of our eyes for most of the night.  The campsite we were at was the only one in the area, so it was nice to not have any noise aside from the babbling brook and the occasional train in the distance (no matter where we go there are always trains!!!).  It got fairly chilly at night, but I still don't think it was as bad as our White Sands trip from 2011ish.

A panorama of our campsite:

We opted to leave our campsite a day early, as adorable as it was, neither of us slept all that well with our sleeping pads on the wood floor of the structure.  It probably kept us a bit warmer, but it certainly made for a stiff night's sleep!  We spared torturing Hannah another chilly night and packed out of camp to enjoy the park for the rest of the day.

Flapping through the water...

There is surprisingly a lot of to do in DeSoto State Park, as small as it is.  We went fishing at Little River, did the scenic drive along the Little River Canyon outside the park, and took many, many pictures.  We then drove into Gadsden for a quick bite to eat at the Blackstone Brew Pub before heading home.  It was so very nice to settle into our warm comfy bed for the night by Friday night and still have the weekend for relaxing at home!

Ugh, and then, Saturday happened...the Iron Bowl happened....and Auburn beat Alabama by a mind blowing last second touchdown....that is all we will say about that...RIP Alabama football 2013, you were fun.

Sunday we lazed about some, but then hit the Cahaba National Wildlife Preserve to try to get in some fishing.  Dan's jazzed about fly fishing so he's spearheading these trips to practice his newest hobby. Water all around us has been high and fast lately with the fall storms from last week, but we still got to get some casting in.  Most of the work in the beginning of fly fishing is just learning how to cast!  It can be super frustrating, especially when flies get snagged in trees, stream rocks, on your own line, etc.  Dan is also learning at quite possibly the WORST time of the year for fishing.  Winter means the water is cold and food is scarce so most of the fish available are hunkered down and not super active feeding-wise.  Plus in general the sunfish in Alabama get spooked super easy.  So give credit to Dan for not giving up despite the lack of even the slightest hint of fish in these waters right now!!!  He's getting the timing down, but golly it takes time!  We are determined to just find a small pond stocked with bass that is geared for kids just so we can finally get a bite!!!

Anywho, happy December (yikes!!)

A tour of our campsite (and Hannah being silly):

Here are some pics (apologies for 95% of them involving Hannah)
xo

p.s. the video I tried to embed for thanksgiving didn't work, so check out the link in the previous post for the most awesome video of your day (ha!).