Travel & Places
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Eightmile Lake | Wenatchee National Forest
On our third night of backpacking in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, we took a relatively flat hike over to Eightmile Lake. There were a few rolling areas but it was an easy hike after our climb up and down Aasgard Pass. It was also a very quiet hike. There were a few people camping on the far side of the lake but we never interacted with them, and we saw no one on our hike into the lake. It might not have been alpine as the Enchantment Lakes were, but it wasn’t without a lot of grand scenery! There was a very cool old dam near the end of the…
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Rainier From The Road | Wordless Wednesday
As seen from I-90, heading west
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Aasgard Pass Descent
If you’ve been reading here long enough you know that Chris and I went to Seattle and the Cascades for our 10th anniversary in 2012. I never actually finished sharing the photos from that time and since I don’t always have a lot of excursions and adventures to share these days, I thought would try to finish sharing those photos over the next few weeks. If you missed any of those posts you can flip through them here. The big chunk of time we spent in Washington State, the primary reason for going, was to hike in the Enchantment Lakes. We had a permit for the Core Enchantment Zone which…
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Wonder at Moody Gardens Pt. 1
I’ve written about Moody Gardens before. I worked there my senior year of college (2001-2002) in the education department staffing touch tanks and talking at the exhibits. The aquarium hadn’t changed in 2011 when we visited and it hadn’t changed *much* this time around but they were in the process of adding in a new exhibit in the center of the building, a tall, ciruclar aquarium that will go between the two floors of the aquarium where previously you could look down from the center on the second floor. That said, it still was a little ‘meh’ in many regards however Forest was very interested when we went over Thanksgiving…
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The Woodlands Trail | Big Thicket National Preserve
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The Wildlife and Island Trails | Martin Dies State Park
On the Sunday of our camping trip several weekends ago we went over to the Walnut Ridge unit of the park to hike for the morning. We merged these two trails together to create a longer loop. There was no one on the Wildlife Trail while we were on it but a few people were starting to explore the Island Trail just as we were leaving. It was definitely a quiet loop to do. The one annoying thing about the trails in this park is that they include the mileage along the roads to get back to the trailhead of origin for their loops, which we thought was weird. There’s…
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The Slough and Forest Trails | Martin Dies State Park
Acer floridanum, southern sugar maple. Ilex opaca, American holly Poor luna moth! Lobelia cardinalis The afternoon we arrived at the state park we combined the Slough and Forest Trails for a giant loop through the Hen House Ridge Unit of the park. Being as it was Saturday the park was very busy and the trails did have people on them, particularly closer to the ‘front country’ interface near the roads. One thing we were definitely surprised with in this park was the size of some of the trees out there, particularly the magnolias, beeches, and even some of the American hollies. Ocassionally there would be a large pine that has…
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Campsite Scenes | Martin Dies State Park
There’s one thing I find annoying about camping reservations with Texas Parks and Wildlife and that’s that you can’t reserve a specific campsite when you reserve your dates online. You are at the mercy of whatever is left when you arrive at that park. The Florida state park system was better in that regard. However, we did end up lucking out with our site a few weekends ago at Martin Dies State Park. We ended up at site 92 in the Gum Slough camping section. It was tucked off in a tiny loop off of the main camping area, next to Gum Slough. We were secluded a bit on one…
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Scenes from the Trails at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
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The Dogwood Trail | Woodville, Texas
Last weekend as we were heading east down US 190 towards Martin Dies Jr. State Park we saw a brown sign pointing out the Dogwood Trail on the north side of the road. We knew the Big Thicket National Preserve was around the area but didn’t think a unit was right there and the Dogwood Trail did not sound familiar. After we got to camp I got on my phone and looked around but couldn’t find much information other than one review on All Trails. It looked interesting enough to check out, though. I tried looking again the following day and did end up finding a bit more information on…