Hot Springs Hike--Pictoral Version

I'm beginning to think I'll never get around to writing a real post on our awesome hike last week, so here is a stream of pictures.

Me and Clint

Clint, Matt, and I on the bridge

 Matt and Alana

 Matt on top of the world

 Alana and me on the beach (can you believe the Hot Springs has a beach?)

 Hiking through the brush

Crossing the stream

We met a new friend along the way, but he looked a little stoned.

 The hot spring we relaxed in was right at the foot of this river.

 The sky was a piercing blue all day.  This friendly pilot waved at us as he flew by.

  I wonder if he was chuckling at the naked people (but for the record, WE were wearing swimsuits).

I just think Alana looks gorgeous in this picture.

I have many beyond this, but blogger doesn't have a user-friendly way to display pictures in bulk, so I'm going to leave it at these.  I wish I had pictures of the springs themselves, but we had left our cameras safely tucked away on the beach while we relaxed in the springs (there's not really a safe place to store a camera in a bikini).  There were several different hot pools to choose from, and I still remember that delicious feeling of sinking into that perfect little pool right in front of the river and feeling utterly awe-struck that I was in a bathwater-warm jacuzzi right in the middle of the desert...in February.  But the highlight of the day for me was a tie between three things:  1.  Jumping into the icy river, 2. Realizing that I had been talking to an old naked man for about ten minutes and had forgotten that he was naked, and 3. Going to dinner at La Casita afterwards.  The third one was probably the most amusing to me, because for some reason Matt was dead-set against any of us "freshening up" (even though we had to stop at our houses first anyway because Alana needed to grab her wallet and Clint needed to change his painful shoes).  So we were one sorry-looking party when we walked into that restaurant.  And unfortunately our sense of class matched our hillbilly appearance; we were so ravishingly starving (13 miles of hiking works up an appetite that trail mix just doesn't quite satiate); we wound up eating five or six baskets of chips before cleaning off our dinner plates.  I really felt sorry for our waiter; we were a tough table to keep up with.

For being a "pictoral" version, this sure included a lot of words.  Wow, I just can't shut-up ever.