Rainy Weekend in the Hill Country

Last weekend was spent at Hill Country State Natural Area near Bandera, Texas. That’s about 45 minutes from the outer reaches of San Antonio. We arrived in the dark and didn’t get to enjoy the scenery until the following morning.

On Saturday we took a semi-long hike (in relative terms here, 6-8 miles, something like that, no 20 miler) through the park but about half way the mist and rain started. It continued that way for the rest of the day which deterred us from wanting to spend it outside. Instead we detoured into Bandera, a cute old fashioned Texas town with historic buildings and unique shops. The rangers at the park office told us of a general store with a soda fountain. Ice cream here we come! Ice cream was probably not the best idea for a cold, dreary day but we ate it nevertheless. Then it was back to the tent for naps and for me to finish reading The Help.

Sunday we departed the park early as it was still crummy out and the trails had turned to sticky mud. Instead we planned to just hit another state park on our way home but were detoured when we saw the Natural Bridge Caverns sign. Cavern? Yep, we went! But that is for another time.

I didn’t take nearly the amount of photos I normally would have due to the rain, and the weather was generally ‘blah’ for cool landscape photos, but here’s a sampling of what we saw:

I kept seeing these small ball moss starts and thinking they were Dendrophylax porrecta ‘babies’.

We saw little wildlife, unless you count a few groups of Boy Scouts and trail runners. The morning we left the birds came out after their day of hiding from the rain. I’d love to scope out the area again one day, particularly when it is sunny.