Indian Springs

The day after Chad's birthday, we decided to take a family trip to Indian Springs State Park.  I could remember going there as a child and thinking that the place totally STUNK!  The sulpher content in the water was extremely high and the whole park smelled like rotten eggs!  However, numerous people had said that the smell had significantly decreased over the years.  And when I got there, I found that they were right.  The only place you could experience the rotten egg smell was at the actual spring and even then it was no where near as potent as I remembered it. 

We started out our trip by playing on the rocks in the water.  We had fun climbing up and down trying to make patterns and paths that would keep us from getting wet.  Caleigh had so much fun doing this, we had to convince her to go to another part of the park with us.  She just wanted to stay and play on the rocks.

In another part of the park, they have a roped off swimming area and "beach".  We headed over to this part and ate a picnic lunch.  Caleigh was super excited to head into the water.  Chad, no so much.  This was Caleigh's first time swimming in a lake.  She has swam in the ocean and in pools but never in a lake or river.  She was a bit intimidated by the little fish at first but got over them very quickly.  Pretty soon, both her and Chad were diving in and out of the water and having a grand time.

After swimming until near exhaustion, we decided to head home for showers.  We got Caleigh changed and started to head out of the park.  The park has numerous playground areas dispersed throughout it and Caleigh had seen many of them as we came in.  We decided to stop at one and let her play for a little while longer.  She could not have been more happy about this.

 Chad even got in on some sliding action.  I had had enough sun for the day and watched them play from the air conditioned car.

Our final stop before we left the park was at the spring itself.  We gathered two bottles of the stinky water to take home.  None of us was brave enough to drink it while it was so smelly.  The water supposedly has healing properties and judging by the number of people there filling gallon and five gallon jugs, many people believe it to be true.  One of the ladies that was there filling her jugs told us to let the water sit for about 3 days and the smell would be all but gone.  The water is still in our outside fridge.  No one has had the desire to open the bottles and smell it again.  After the springs we finally headed home.