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Chinquapin Trail Loop at Huntsville State Park
As the saying goes, “What a month this week has been!” Let’s step outside for a bit, even if it is in retrospect, to last Halloween weekend at Huntsville State Park. It was our first camping trip of the season, the first since our last one in late February/early March before the pandemic closed everything down. I believe it was Huntsville State Park that was our last camping trip, too! We set off for the large outer loop, the Chinquapin Trail, around the lake. Forest decided these roots along the trail were mountains to climb so he crawled up them and proceeded to do that for several others we found…
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Almost Wordless Wednesday | Coup Attempt
What a damn day. Upside: Hell yeah, Georgia! Photos from February 2008.
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September on the Lone Star Trail
Whiteleaf Mountain Mint, Pycnanthemum albescens Digging back into some of my drafted posts, today we are going back to September and yet another jaunt on the Lone Star Trail. I really need to figure out what gaps we have left on this trail. We’ve very nearly finished a lot of the portion west of I-45 but there are some small gaps where we turned around and didn’t connect. This trip was after our yearly trip to a patch of beautyberries where we take birthday photos for Forest. A wine colored fruiting beautyberry. Violet Coral Fungus, Clavaria zollingeri This may be one of the coolest fungi I have ever come across…
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Along the Nenana River
I still have a good handful of posts that share from our August/September 2019 trip to Alaska. There’s no reason I shouldn’t have wrapped these up a lot sooner than 1.5 years later but I hope in the coming months I can get everything squared away. I think part of the problem is I really wish we could travel and get to Alaska again. There was so much to see and explore up there that even if we lived there it would take a lifetime to get to it all. This will be the last post from along the Denali Highway, where we stopped alongside the Nenana River as it…
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New Year’s on the Texas Coastal Bend
We checked in with an old friend yesterday, The Big Tree, aka: The Goose Island Oak. We hadn’t been by to see it since Forest’s second birthday, before Hurricane Harvey. Of course, we had plans to visit the year he turned three but Harvey struck the week before and shattered those plans. And it has taken us this long to get back down to Rockport. She’s showing signs of wear and age but thankfully there’s a team working to keep her going after all these years. Before we made it to the oak, we stopped into the main area of Goose Island State Park to walk around and go out…
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2020 In Review
Well, let’s recap this wild, strange, and insane year! January Somehow I went to Florida! How was this in 2020? I left Billy Goat Day thinking that in 2021 I would possibly come back and go to the FT Kick Off and then maybe hike through Big Cypress with the thru-hikers, and possibly convince Chris to come along. Ahh, dreams! Travel! Those were the days! I still laugh when I remember seeing folks wearing masks in the airport (more so on the way to Florida) and they weren’t necessarily folks from Asian countries (to be clear, this was still very few people, but more than the usual International Traveler sort…
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Galveston in Winter
I had hoped that we would have made a trip back to the beach, from our last trip in the summer, before now, but here we were, late December and just now getting back to the beach. Back then I think we thought online school was going to be different and we could just skip Zoom lessons and do work later. Which, we *could* do, but it turned out to be more complicated than just being flexible and up and going to the beach in the middle of the week. So, we never made it there. Since we found ourselves with some time over this holiday break we made the…
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Christmas 2020
Our Christmas was quiet this year. Christmas Day is always quiet and then the day after we typically pack up and head to DFW and spent the next 5-6 days visiting 3 different groups of families. This year none of that was happening. We did a modified Christmas with one group via Zoom and I called my parents on Christmas Day and had Forest open his presents from them while they could watch. It was a bit somber and sad to think about missing out on holiday goodies and hugs and time with the family but I know it was for the best. Since seeing reports of record travel at…
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Escaping the House to Lake Creek Nature Preserve
On Saturday Forest and I escaped the house for a short hike. We had actually first escaped mid-afternoon on Thursday for a wonderful, warm and sunny hike to another nature preserve after a very frustrating online school morning. But otherwise we’d mostly been clinging to the house from online school to work, and if the weather was nice we would go out and wander the yard a bit. Chris had gone to Mississippi the Sunday before and I was single parenting it for the next week+. And by the end of the week my mental reserves were gone and getting outside was needed. We hadn’t been to Lake Creek Preserve…
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Finding Bartonia texana aka: Texas screwstem
The last two Octobers we’ve tried to find the Texas screwstem, Bartonia texana. And we had no luck finding them. But this time we were successful! Actually, Chris was successful because he went out a day before and spent more time looking and expanded his search zone and came home to tell us he had found them! So we made a backpacking trip out of it and stayed out there for a night so we’d have time to take photos and relax a bit for all of the effort bushwhacking to this location involves. A faded luna moth returning to the soil of the forest. A three-toed box turtle, Terrapene…