Chip off the ol' hiking boot?

I was rather pleased today when my 6 year old asked me to go hiking. There was grumbling from him last week when I took him to check out the progress of the Potomac National Heritage trail which is being blazed by our house. The trail, unfortunately, is overgrown with poison ivy and is host to a prosperous community of ticks. One nestled, undiscovered for 24 hours, in his belly button resulting in a case of cellulitis and a trip to the pediatricians for evaluation and antibiotics. He is, thankfully, recovered now. Not wanting to squash his desire to get on a trail, we headed out to Red Rock Regional Park 10 minutes away in Leesburg. I donned my boots out of just plain not able to be on a trail without them. A fanny pack loaded with two nalgenes of ice water helped with periods of thirst.
Red Rocks is a wonderful park with numerous trails which, if hiked in their entirety, can make for a few miles of lovely easy hiking in woods. A trail skirts the cliffs overlooking the Potomac River and Maryland across the way. The day was warm and leaves are out in full. Numerous flowers were about. One white flower was quite abundant on bushes. I'm hoping Mike can identify it for me. It is actually quite fragrant and the scent was borne on the occasional cooling breeze.
The trail we took led us down to the flood plain by the Potomac River. The trails to and from the river are quite steep with interesting rock formations and cliffs as the buffer. With the Potomac at normal levels, a trail exists along it's bank. I have seen this area flooded in past hikes and it is quite interesting to see the strength of the river. I let Mason lead the way and let him choose which trails we would hike on. He could not resist climbing back up the trail to the bluffs. The trail is steep enough for a hand over foot scramble. We continued on in and out of ravines and checking out the wonderful overlook onto the Potomac and over into Maryland. The path returning to the parking area from the overlook is loaded with raspberries later in the season. We neared the end at the Parking lot and Mason decided the fun was not over. We explored the old ice house, with me explaining why people used it instead of a refrigerator. Not sure he could comprehend that. We continued along the various paths. Finally I could see that he was losing his bearings enough that he was worried about being lost. I stopped our progress to let him know I knew where we were and then to explain our position. Maps exist for this park, unfortunately, the Park authority has been lacking on replenishing them. We continued to move on with Mason's face lighting up as we intersected with a trail we were on before. He remembered exactly where to go and then took yet another of the trails we had not been on yet. We reached a stream crossing, though the stream was dry at this time. the footbridge spanning the stream bed had taken a direct hit from a falling tree. This elicited a fountain of questions from my son. The questions were anything from why did the tree fall to safety of the bridge to were we ever going to make it back now. We made it across the bridge, which to Mason, was like crossing some forgotten delapitated jungle rope bridge in the Himalayas. I did not mention to my intrepid Sherpa that we could have simply walked across the stream bed. The precarious bridge crossing pretty much sealed the fate of further exploration, and it was on to the car. He was recalling past walks on the trail with pretty good detail now, and he continued to revel in locating the next blaze on a tree to inform me that he was keeping us from getting lost. My hero. Upon reaching the car we high fived for a well done hike. He informed me we had done a good job. It was off to Friendly's Ice Cream for orange sherbert cones. Nice outing.