My husband and I try and take a mini vacation every once in a while to just get away from it all.  This kind of trip typically involves the outdoors and the dogs.  Since we’d planned to use up the rest of our vacation time from work for the week of Thanksgiving we figured this was ample opportunity to ‘just get away’ for a little while and what better way to do that than to hit the trails?

We planned for weeks on where we wanted to go.  We researched the various trails, distances and locations that we wanted to check out since we had already thoroughly abused the local parks and recreation areas close to home.  At the suggestion of our friend Cindy from The Nut House, we checked out the deal on Fort Custer State Park.  That was it.  We had found our spot and the wait began – which was mercifully short.

We headed toward Kalamazoo on Sunday evening after attending the NWDA weight pull that was being hosted that weekend (more on that later) and settled into our hotel room (after an awesome dinner at Mongolian BBQ!) for the evening since we were going to hit the trails first thing in the morning on Monday with the pack and the addition of Peanut and Cindy.

Left to Right: Peanut, Lyric, Ryker, Mika & Luna

We hit the trails around 11am the following morning after packing our backpacks with the supplies for the trip and harnessing up the dogs and got lost in the woods for four hours.  We made a few stops throughout since my knees aren’t always the greatest on hikes (and for a picnic lunch!).  We seemed to be alone to enjoy the wilderness with our pack of pit bulls other than a pair of mountain bikers who were stopped due to one of them wiping out and messing up his bike pretty badly (he was uninjured, thankfully!).

All in all, it was a wonderful set of trails despite the fact that they were pretty poorly marked.  I can’t wait to head back there in the spring when the weather is a touch better to do it all again.

Here are a few more shots from our trip.  The rest can be viewed here.