My sister, Nicole, arrived in Cleveland yesterday evening. We visited Cuyahoga Valley National Park today. It’s her first national park and I kept telling her how lucky she is that her first one is one of the less amazing ones. My first national park was Zion and now it’s hard to impress me.

We did two hikes today. We started the day with the Ledges trail that goes through some cool rocks, but we made it a longer loop through the forest. Supposedly, there’s a great view of the valley from one of the overlooks, but all we could see was the tops of the trees. It probably looks beautiful in the fall when all the leaves start changing colors.

After the hike, we stopped at the visitor center. When we were little, we had an Arthur (the aardvark) book where Arthur’s aunt brings the family “maple syrup all the way from Ohio!” That was a line we often repeated growing up and Nicole really wanted to buy some maple syrup all the way from Ohio. We didn’t know where to get some since regular grocery stores just have maple syrup from Vermont or Canada, so Nicole asked the rangers at the visitor center and they knew where to find it.

Once we had procured the maple syrup, we hiked the Brandywine Falls loop. The falls are the most popular attraction in the park and they’re the largest continuously running falls in Ohio. We found a spot where we could walk across the river to a shady area on the other side and ate our lunch there, accompanied by a snake who was also eating its lunch. I had heard and seen pictures of snakes unhinging their jaw and the bulging form of their prey in their stomachs, but I had never seen it in person until today.

At one point during the hike, we could pick between making the loop small, medium, or large. We picked the medium loop but soon started hearing thunder, saw that the gray clouds overhead were slowly moving closer, and the wind started picking up. So we backtracked to take the small loop option and made it back to the car before it started raining.

We only had one day at Cuyahoga since it’s a small park. Tomorrow, we’re driving to NY for another sister’s bachelorette.