Outdoors
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Hiking at McKinney Roughs Nature Park
It had awhile since we had done any out of town weekend trips. Chris’ birthday was last week and I had been pressing him for a month or so to decide where he might want to go. When we were living in Florida we started taking weekend trips on occasion to little areas of Florida just to get away. Most of the time we would head to the west coast, usually around Sarasota but sometimes we’d go to Sanibel or Ft. Myers. We’ve been back in Texas for five years now and have tried to continue doing similar trips when we can, however we usually head to the Hill Country…
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Local Adventures | On the Lone Star Trail
It’s been a long time since I have categorized something as a Local Adventure, though I have had other blog entries that might have been written as such. I decided this hiking trip should be labelled as a Local Adventure and so here we go! After having quite a busy and hot summer (when is it never hot in Texas during the summer?) Chris and I sat down and planned out a pretty full autumn and early winter, filled with camping trips and other excursions. We have a lot on our plate at home, too, with general yard and house chores. Sometimes, a lot of the time, I tend to…
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Nature in the City | A Sunday Morning at Burroughs Park
For an earlier trip here, see this post and this post. For most of the summer it seemed as if we were go-go-go or bury our head and do some kind of house project, well, that last part was Chris. August was our month to recuperate a bit, though Chris has been out of town for work a few times so he hasn’t gotten to recoup as much as he has wanted. We layed low last weekend but still wanted to do something fun and outdoors. The summer has been awfully hot as I think it has been for much of the country. Paired with barely any rain compared to…
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Famous Trees of Texas | The Zachary Taylor Oak ( Tree 73 )
For the original scope behind this, visit here for our first trees. Right before we headed off for vacation earlier this month I grabbed the Famous Trees of Texas book to scout out any trees that might be around our vacation destination. I found three that were within reach, including the tree I am writing about here. The others we didn’t end up getting to, though one of them, the Goose Island Oak, we went to five years ago on our Texas roadtrip post AT thru-hike. I also visited it as a kid with my parents. Anyway, we didn’t make it back to that tree for it to count on…
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Old Memories | New Memories
It’s been almost five years since I was on Mustang Island and in Port Aransas. It’s been even longer, decades, since I took an actual vacation there with my parents. It must have been high school, maybe middle school, the last time I was there on vacation with them. They’ve gone many years since then but Chris and I were in Florida for a lot of those times. The last two years for their vacations they went to Arkansas, one of which we joined them on. Last year I was too pregnant to be traveling that far. When my parents mentioned they were going back to Port A this year…
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Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle Hatchling Release on Padre Island National Seashore
For the last week of blog silence here we’ve been in Port Aransas, Texas on vacation with my family. I had hoped to write a few blogs while I was gone but the wifi at the beachouse my parent’s rented was absolutely horrible. I was lucky to get online just to check email and read a few things online for about twenty minutes a day. Forget anything else productive! I’ll have a bigger write-up about the trip soon, but I wanted to cover one of the more fun things we did while there. On July 3rd, Friday evening, once we’d arrived and gotten settled in, my dad and Chris ran…
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Tips For Hiking With A Baby
When I found out I was pregnant in December of 2013 I knew that our outdoor hiking life would be changing for awhile. I tried to find other people online who still did outdoorsy things with their babies and kids, people who hiked and backpacked with babies and toddlers. I didn’t want that aspect of our life to change that drastically. Of course, it has and it did. But, we still have made it work. Are we doing any long distance trails? Nope, but we are doing long dayhikes. It was our hike in Sam Houston National Forest in February that helped me realize that we could do it, that…
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Hike it Baby Hike at Terry Hershey Park
An Amorpha sp. I mentioned Hike it Baby a few posts ago in my link roundup and that I was going to try to go on one with Keely last weekend. Well, we did make it despite some passing t-showers that were coming in off the Gulf. It didn’t threaten to rain until we were about to leave the hike anyway. We met at a parking lot at the outlet of the Barker Reservoir/George Bush Park in Katy. Terry Hershey Park is a greenway that lines Buffalo Bayou heading east towards Houston. I hadn’t seen Keely since 4th of July in 2013. We’ve kept in touch via email, blogs, and…
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Camping at Brazos Bend State Park
Last weekend we made it out for our last camping trip of the season. It was borderline too hot and humid anyway, but we toughed it out. There was a chance of rain but nothing appeared until our drive home, thankfully. I would definitely like to visit this state park a few more times with Forest as he grows up. There’s a lot to do at the park with a ton of trails, a small nature center, plus the George Observatory. A lot of the trails were closed this weekend due to recent rains and flooding over the trails, but we made do with more of the front country trails…
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Swamp Walk
Remember that trip to Florida I took last March while still in my first trimester of pregnancy? Well, I took a bunch of short videos in our ghost orchid slough and meant to make a video a year ago. Well, I finally got around to putting it together tonight! It’s only a little over three minutes but it gives a fun glimpse into the slough and several great shots of healthy ghost orchids, which were unfortunately not blooming at the time. Below this video is a link to Chris’ video from when we got the sphinx moth pollinating/visiting a ghost orchid back in 2007. We got a good laugh at…