Camping in the Catskills

This weekend my family took a trip out to the Catskills. We usually go up to the Adirondack Mountains, but we decided to do something different. We brought all of our kayaks in the truck and camped at North South Lake. We got there Friday morning and set up camp, and then headed to the lake and kayaked around for a couple hours. The lake was alot smaller than we had expected, and you can’t ever completely enjoy a lake at a state park with all their silly regulations about not jumping out and such, but it was nice and relaxing anyways. 🙂 After that we found the cliff jumping spot I had heard about and jumped it a couple times. It was a gorgeous little spot! Right by a waterfall and a couple different ledges to jump off. Sam sliced his foot up there (not too bad) and I may have landed wrong once (i’m fine) but all in all, I still think it was worth it. There’s nothing like the little adrendaline rush of freefalling! We headed back to our campsite and sat around the fire….hoping to see a bear. Yes. Alissa even prayed that we’d see one. hehe. But we didn’t. The neighbors a couple campsites over however, seemed to have gotten an intruder since we woke up to them banging pots an pans and honking the car horn! Next day we packed alot into the day. I won’t go into all the detail, but we did alot of hiking around, going to different lookouts and vistas and high points in the area, exploring and visited the tallest waterfall in NYS – Kaaterskill Falls. It was beautiful! We hiked to the base, and then to the midpoint where the first tier falls into a big swimming hole, and then in the evening we hiked to the veery top of the fall. Really sweet spot! I got offered to repel off the cliff and down the side of the waterfall! My insides were screaming “yes!” but my common sense wouldn’t let me…seeing as how we didn’t know the guys offering, and they had to be drinking. people! I really wanna go back sometime though and repel off it. I’ve always wanted to do that. 🙂 All in all it was a great weekend. The video just recaps some of the many highlights. 🙂 Family memories!