Following along in Unplugged Sunday's footsteps....
I found a website, Local Hikes, that has been quite inspiring for my family recently. It allows you to look up the various trails both near and far to where you are and to read the relevant information about them. A good many of the trails on the page for Pittsburgh I was already familiar with but there are a good many that I didn't know or haven't hiked.
We picked one such trail yesterday. Roaring Run-McKenna Trail was an easy 6 mile loop through a beautiful forest. I packed a lunch and grabbed the camera and Rick gathered up the kids and dogs and we drove about an hour out of the city. The seven of us hiked and chatted, hiked and lunched and hiked and then three of us kept silent, (trying to enjoy) enjoying nature while one of us kept a running monologue of her entire third grade year right down to a very detailed description of a book her teacher read her....at the beginning of the year.
Ironically....guess which one of us spotted this guy off to the right side of the trail munching a mushroom?
Yup, the chatty one also has eagle eyes. We gathered around the turtle, oohing and ahhing until the poor thing gave us the hairy eyeball and started backing away. I snapped a quick picture and motioned everyone along. All of us felt pretty proud and we talked about turtles until two bikers came squeezing by. They stopped to chat to us for a few minutes to tell us about the black bear they spotted earlier on their ride not too far from where they began.
Suddenly, our turtle paled in comparison.
