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Thanksgiving Camping Part I | South Llano River State Park
Thanksgiving, and our typical camping ritual, came as a much needed respite this year in the post-election angst and haze of the last few weeks. Weather is always the factor on if a camping trip will happen this time of year; last year we were rained out and changed our plans for a weekend in Galveston. It appeared that the weather was going to mostly cooperate so we headed off for South Llano River State Park which is west of San Antonio off of I-10 near the town of Junction. The drive out on Thursday went as smoothly as it could go with a stop at Buc-ees to pick up…
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Magical Marigolds
I can’t remember where and when we bought these marigolds this year but sometime in the last few months they spread their branches and took over a corner of the garden. That was fine with us, really, because they looked good and really made the garden perk up a bit. My mom grew marigolds when I was growing up and when they went to seed my brother and I would pick the seed heads and spread the seeds in the garden where they would germinate the next growing season. Forest has also love the marigolds and cannot resist, no matter how much I tell him, to pick one. He smells…
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Monarch Life and Death
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve seen a lot of activity in regards to the monarch butterflies. About two weeks ago, when I took these photos, there was still some adults flitting about and at least one new caterpillar but since then it seems the majority have moved south towards Mexico. I caught the adult female above resting on the ‘Wendy’s Wish’ salvia one day at lunch and it was only later when I looked on a photo I took on my phone that I saw an empty chrysalis. Due to the docile nature of the butterfly at the time I put two and two together and decided…
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Hiking at Martin Creek Lake State Park
On our way up to Caddo Lake we passed a sign for Martin Creek Lake State Park. It looked enticing so when we were deciding what to do on Sunday morning, stay near Caddo and find something to do or head back towards home and do something in another park, we opted to check out this park before we hit up lunch in the town of Henderson. As we turned down the park road I saw that the lake had a power plant on the opposite shore. When we checked in at the park office the trees shielded most of the view so I put the idea of camping at…
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Caddo Lake Hiking
There are just handful of trails at Caddo Lake State Park and it was easy to cover them all in a short amount of time. Surprisingly there was a good amount of terrain change on the trails, at least for this part of Texas. That’s because there are quite a bit of slope forests in the region associated with creek systems. We had to split our hiking time up between my parents so that one of them stayed back to watch their Boston terrier, Daisy. Mom hiked with us Friday afternoon after we’d set up camp and we promptly got lost on the trails because they weren’t labeled appropriately. Luckily…
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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…
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Stronger Together
This was an unplanned post. This was me yesterday at lunch. I voted in the morning, wore a white shirt in solidarity because I don’t have a pantsuit that I can fit into, and happily cast my ballot for Hillary Clinton. Tears welled up in my eyes when I was getting dressed; it was going to be a monumental day! As the evening wore on I tried to go to bed at 10:30, only Forest woke up and I had to go calm him back to sleep. As I sat on my phone more tears came to my eyes as it was evident it was going to be monumental in…
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September and October 2016 Book Report
I was in the middle of a lot of books in September so I didn’t want to do a book report at that time. However, I’ve now finished a bunch of books and am in the middle of more! Before I launch into that I’m going to launch into a rave about how much I now enjoy listening to audiobooks because I figured out how to speed them up! I have always been super bored by audiobooks, finding only a few here and there that caught my attention well enough to listen through. Recently, though, I started seeing people talk about speeding audiobooks up because many readers are speed readers…
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Seedlings
It’s been awhile since I went out and took photos in the garden using the reverse macro technique. Since Chris got me a new 18-55 lens for my birthday, I’m using my old lens (which had some connection problems) for things like reverse macro and freelensing when I think to use it. Here’s a bit of what I shot last week; I mostly wanted to shoot the seedlings out in the vegetable garden. Blackberry Lily Monarch caterpillars Tomato flowers Red giant mustard Spinach seedlings Radish seedlings
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Piecing Together Trails | Garner State Park
Old CCC entrance to the park Before breaking down camp and heading home after our camping trip, we went for morning hike along the Wild Horse Creek, Highway, and Ashe Juniper trails. We saw no one along the trails until we were almost back to the car. The trail starts along Wild Horse Creek which is a pretty, spring-flowing creek that looked great for exploring when Forest gets a bit bigger. The trail gently undulates and climbs but levels out after awhile. It was quiet along the trail, not a lot of activity, though plenty of plant identifying to be had for the botany geeks like us. We didn’t complete…