Exploring we Go

This morning Ammon & I decided to get out of the house and do some exploring. I've always wanted to walk across the bridge by The Iowa River Power Company restaurant. I wasn't sure what to expect considering the area completely flooded this time last year.
Before we could go explore the bridge we needed to make a pit stop at a small grocery store by our house and get fruit-roll ups. For some reason Ammon was smelling them this morning and just had to have them. Since I don't ever get them, these are a treat for us. At the store they have kid sized grocery carts that Ammon loves to push around.
When we got to the bridge Ammon looked across and saw "a beach" of sand right by the river that he wanted to go check out. We walked across the bridge and found that the river split many times and there were many small water falls (just a few feet high) to look at. When we got across the river we saw that we could easily get down to a very slow moving area to throw some rocks in.


Then we decided that if there were people fishing on "the beach" that we too could get over to that area. So we headed down the other side of the bridge. We had to cross a small stream that someone had put rocks across to make it a dry crossing.
What we found when we got over the creek totally surprised us. We found beautiful SHELLS. They were all over in the sand. Some were broken, but many were still in great condition.


The closer we got to the main river, the more muscles shells we found. Some were a good 5" across.


There was a HUGE pile of logs that were piled up. When Ammon saw the pile he said "That's a HUGE pile for a fire!" One was out far enough to walk on. Ammon balanced his way across the entire tree and jumped off at the end.

We never made it to "the beach" Ammon had flip flops on and the sand was bothering his feet, so we headed back under the bridge to get a closer look at the waterfalls. What we were walking in was where the flooding was last year, and you could still see some of the debree.
Ammon by this point was ready to go back onto the bridge and walk over the BIG waterfall, so we headed back up to the bridge (but not before he had a potty break in the bushes-which he thought was a pretty sneaky thing to do).
He had a great time stopping and looking out over the river. He was afraid his sunglasses would fall in the water, so he handed them to me, then decided to be a cool dude with his hat backwards.




After walking on the bridge we went and got a sandwich and headed to Upper City Park for a picnic. He was so excited to see that the pool was almost all full of beautiful blue water. Then he played at the park.

He loves the merry go rounds and doesn't seem to ever tire or get dizzy from them. He took a ride on each of the animals and even sang me a wonderful song complete with hand motions while spinning.


He saw the log cabins at the park and wanted to go explore them. There are 2 cabins, which really could use so work. The bigger one had a room with screens on either side of it. Inside there was a bird flying back and forth. It was so scared to be stuck and was flying around really wildly.


Ammon really wanted to get the bird out, so he stopped to think about how to get the bird out.


We walked around the building to see what we could do. He decided that maybe he could call the bird to the hole under the door (it probably flew in through this hole to begin with), but that didn't work.

Then he thought that maybe he could take the building apart, but decided "that's too hard because it was built with nails." He was sad to leave the bird, but he did his best to get it free.


We had such a fun time exploring, and decided that we'd like to take the rest of the family back over the bridge to "the beach" and look for more shells, but this time we'd wear tennis shoes!