Caddo Lake Camping

Last weekend Chris and I met my parents at Caddo Lake State Park in northeast Texas. It is a 5ish hour haul from our house with stops for the toddler. And while it is about the same distance time-wise of other places we go to in the Hill Country, this just seems like a harder place to get to because of the need to take multiple smaller highways to navigate through east Texas. There’s not really a direct route.

We took Friday off to make it a more enjoyable weekend due to the distance and my parents came down on Friday as well. I really loved this state park for multiple reasons, one being that it happened to be pretty quiet. I’m not sure if it was because it is a smaller campground or because of its location but it seems we’ve had problems (my parents included) recently with loud campgrounds and campers turning the volume up at the sites once the sun set. The only noise that was a problem here was our campground was relatively near the road so we heard cars driving by quite often; the campers were pretty quiet. In fact, the toddler was probably the loudest person in our section!

With the abnormally (or hey, maybe it’s the new normal, especially now post-election) warm weather fall has seemed to show up much but we did find some semblance of the season and a bit of a cozy feeling at the state park. The forest was starting to turn various shades of brown, yellow, red, and orange and a cool front brought a chill for the evenings and mornings. It was perfect weather, honestly.

Having my parents at the campsite, though it was cut short due to illness from my mom, was wonderful. They got to play with Forest and we got to chat and hang out with them. I like this joint camping thing! It was quiet Sunday morning when we woke and they weren’t there.

I am definitely looking forward to returning to this state park in the future when Forest is more boat ready because paddling on the lake will be a lot of fun. There’s also a Wildlife Management Areas and National Wildlife Refuge nearby that would be worth checking out, too. Chris and I rented a small boat six years ago to tool around the lake and had a lot of fun; the area is ripe with exploration!

I’ll be back soon with a write-up about the hiking in the state park as well as hiking another trail at another state park in our way home last Sunday.

Happy weekend, y’all!