In the morning we woke up to a delicious breakfast of fruit, then a ham and cheese quiche. While eating breakfast we sketched out our plans for the day. Decided to go to Cathedral State Park in the morning, and swing up to Falling Waters for a tour in the late afternoon.

The weather here in Maryland was quite foggy and damp, but thankfully not raining. When we got into Frostburg (only about 3 miles from The Castle) we saw snow on all the cars, it looked like they got about half an inch over the night!

The drive out to Cathedral took a little over an hour, and once we got there we were instantly disappointed, the big attraction there was the "Centennial Hemlock" and it had fallen down! Further exploration of the immediate area disappointed us further, the ground was muddy, there was snow piled up in places (sometimes blocking the trail), and the restrooms were all locked.

We decided to head to Blackwater Falls instead.

After getting a little lost (per my directions, oops) we made it to Blackwater Falls around 1pm. There was a bunch of people there. We walked down the wooden walkway to see the falls, only to discover that the bottom half of the walkway was closed! There was snow and ice all over it. Plus, there were people standing there smoking, kids running around screaming and throwing snowballs. Yuck. Michael got a bit annoyed at it all and walked back up to the car, we soon followed.

In the car we talked for a bit about where to go next. We had plans at Falling Waters, but decided to skip that and try again for somewhere to hike. Michael had mentioned Audra State Park in West Virginia, and I had originally dismissed it because of the distance (over 2 hours from where we were staying), but we were pretty disappointed with the day thus far and decided to go anyway.

The trip there took us down a whole lot of windy roads, up and down mountains, and as soon as we got through that the clouds parted and the sun came out. "I made the right choice," Michael said, grinning. I took this just to mean he'd finally get his nice hiking trip in, little did I know what he had planned!

We arrived at Audra around 2:30, all climbed out of the car and headed toward a trail that Michael thought looked promising (he was looking for a specific trail he'd been on before and really enjoyed). It was everything he said it would be, and with the sun out, the day was turning out even better than I had expected. The trail was slippery, and on one particularly damp part where the ice was melting and dripping over everything, a rock came loose and caused Michael to lose his footing and slip. He was fine, albeit him and the camera were a little muddy, and hopped up quickly enough. I grabbed some tissues from the backpack and we were busy cleaning up the mud when Barry was called him to check out a nice spot he had found, I didn't think anything of it.

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