Sometimes I forget I'm 40

Yesterday my son Kevin & I ventured out to Minnehaha Falls to get some great photos with our camera's we got for Christmas of the frozen fall. Neither one of us have seen an actual frozen waterfall.

It was BEAUTIFUL!

We decided that we would climb over the "stairs closed" chain and work our way to the bottom of the falls. Going down the icy stairs was not easy. The first set of stairs we hung onto the rail and slid down on our feet. There was no traction. So the next three sets of stairs we decided to slide down on our bottoms as it was just sheer ice covering the steps and it was pretty smooth sliding. You only had to slide down about 10 or 15 steps at a time. No problem! Weee...this is fun!

We made it to the bottom of the falls. It was spectacular!

Then....I decided it was a brilliant idea to make my way up the icy side of the hill and get behind the waterfall. Other people were doing it. And hey, that would be cool. After the fourth attempt, I finally made it up the slippery side of the hill and made my way behind the falls. It was so neat. Definitely worth the trip. I took more photos. Poor little Kevin just never got his footing and he kept sliding back down.

Getting down from behind the falls to the bottom was not as easy as everyone else who had done it looked. I sat down to slide myself down the icy slope. I held onto my camera so I wouldn't knock it around. Wow...you slide much faster than you would think.

Midway down, I didn't veer to the left like I was supposed to and like everyone else who slid down did. I don't know what went wrong. I hit an ice bump and ended up spinning around and hitting the middle of my back on a big ice rock. OUCH! Then I continued spinning on my back hitting every other single ice chunk, bump, rock in sight.

Kevin described it as coming down the hill like a rag doll. He asked as I laid at the bottom of the hill saying my last ouch if I needed an ambulance. No, I was fine, I just needed a minute to compose myself and assess the damage before I stand up.

I got up and was dusting myself off, when BAM! I got hit with an ice ball in the arm. It flew from out of no where. I honestly have no idea where it came from, but it hit me hard. Left a mark too. It was then that Kevin said "Let's get out of here, Karma isn't being very good to you today. What did you do to make it mad?"

We walked down the path that followed the river to try to find an easier way up back to the van. We didn't want to try to make our way up the icy stairs that we slid down. So we found a spot further down the path that looked like a good path on the side of the hill to make our way up. No ice! We could dig our feet in to get good grip and there were tree branches for us to grab hold of. It was certainly steeper than it looked, but we made it!

I told the hubby about our venture when we got home. His reply after I told him "everybody else did it that way, but didn't wipe out" was "How many of them were 40?"

Ok...he got me on that one. Smarty pants. But it was completely worth the beating. Although, I won't be trying that again.