Matthison State Park

So yesterday was Jill's 13th birthday. Our family likes to go somewhere special for the 13th birthday. I went to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which was awesome! I'm an investment freak. Mike went to the GMC plant up in Wisconsin. That was pretty cool. They were making Yukons when we were there. Anyway, Jill chose to go to Matthison State Park. It's a State Park downstate a couple hours, and it's one of the places I really enjoy going. They've got some rather adventurous trails that you can do. Mike and I did a few 1 foot wide rock ledges that were straight up rock to one side and straight down drop to the the other. It was pretty awesome. It's absolutely gorgeous down there. You can go down a whole bunch of stairs into the "gorge" area, which is pretty much the best area for adventurous stuff. You have to literally cross the stream rock by rock! Grandma, Jill and Brandon had a bit of an interesting time getting across the rocks. But with a little help from my guns, they made it across just fine! We found an awesome snake in the middle of the path as we were walking up along the side of the "gorge." Everybody was freaking out and saying "Don't touch it, it might be poisonous!" I'm sitting there, looking at it, and the thing is only 8 inches long! Granted, there are tiny poisonous snakes, but I was pretty sure this one was not able to do any damage! So I picked it up and then got a couple great pictures! I also got a pretty sweet pic of Mike, King of the Rock!