Texas
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Cibolo Creek
I’m trying to finish going through some photos from Memorial Day weekend when we went to the Texas Hill Country. The first part of the weekend happened to be a little rainy. One of those days we stopped by Cibolo Creek a place we’d been to before three years ago when we did a Texas road trip, camping at various state parks from the Panhandle to the Texas coast. The nature center had changed a bit since we’d visited, a new building for nature education was built and the road entrance was improved considerably. While the creek itself was flowing rather lazily at the time we went, there was evidence…
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Austin In A Day
Last Sunday I made a very quick trip over to Austin to spend the day with my friend Rosemarie. We were college friends, having met aboard the Texas Clipper II when we sailed the summer before our freshman year in college. She’s from a town just outside of Austin but now lives in California and had come to visit her family for two weeks. We met at the Treaty Oak, a tree I’d heard about but had not visited. I found it tucked between parking lots and a shopping center, so it was hard to imagine the many other oaks that used to surround this now lone oak. After spending…
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Afternoon at Lost Maples | Late Spring
Over Memorial Day weekend we headed off towards the Texas Hill Country west of San Antonio to do a little exploring. Our original intentions were to hit up Government Canyon State Natural Area since we always seemed to drive past it for other parks further west. Well, the weather decided not to play nice that weekend. Only days before we had been planning on kayaking along the Guadalupe River but a call to an outfitter and checking the river levels online revealed the river was a bit dry for running the river where we were planning. Then storms came through two days in a row causing flooding. Then there was…
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Natives of Texas Nursery | Kerrville, Texas
Last weekend while in the Hill Country we wanted to stop at a couple of nurseries to scope out what might be for sale in a different region than where we are in southeast Texas. We found a very tiny place near Bandera with a couple of cacti that were of interest, but didn’t buy anything. Google search and maps revealed not too many places and most of the ones that popped up were closed on Sunday, which is when we wanted to go. I found Natives of Texas and it said they were open on Sunday but I called just to verify before we left Boerne (apparently that is…
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Hohenberger Farmstead on the Old San Antonio Road
If you’ve ever driven around Texas for any length of time you’ll likely find yourself passing a brown sign pointing to a historical marker off to the side of the road. Many times it just faces a field, but sometimes they are in front of actual buildings. Chris and I were driving from Fredericksburg to Old Tunnel State Park on the Old San Antonio Road when we saw a long stone wall that went on for perhaps a mile. Then we came upon this house and since we had a bit of time to kill before getting to the state park I had Chris turn around so we could check…
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Mexican Free-Tailed Bats at Old Tunnel State Park
Over the weekend Chris and I went to the Texas Hill Country near Boerne to do some hiking and exploring of the area. We happened upon a rainy weekend, complete with some flooding in the San Antonio area. Because of this some of the areas we wanted to go to were closed. As I was planning our trip I found a small park on Google Earth called Old Tunnel State Park. So on Sunday night as we drove back from Fredericksburg to our motel in Comfort we took the Old San Antonio Road to the state park. I really wasn’t expecting a lot of people but boy, was I wrong!…
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Upland Island Wilderness Explorations
Last weekend Chris and I met up in Lufkin, Texas to attend at Zoo Brew fundraiser at the Ellen Trout Zoo. Chris has been working in Beaumont again and one of our field coworkers lives in Lufkin and his wife was part of the Zoo Brew committee. It sounded like a great event and diversion for our weekend so Chris and I went and enjoyed ourselves. We didn’t get to see a lot of the zoo animals as most were put away to avoid being stressed too much. However, we saw and heard the zoo’s many peacocks. I’m pretty sure they need to invest in some peacock birth control; peacocks…
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Evening Along The Shore
Ah, Galveston. I love this island. For those who haven’t been reading long, my history with the island is that I spent four years there while in college. The island is equal parts old money, spring break, summer vacation, and ratty hole-in-the-wall. It’s still a little bit of a place called home for me, though. Chris and I spent a little bit of time down at the beach that we got engaged at. We think.. You see, when we got engaged there were more dunes and vegetation and a sign for riding horses on the beach. That was back in 2001. Since then Hurricane Ike came through and well, the…
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Birding at Sportsman Road | Galveston
Last Saturday Chris and I drove down Sportsman Road on the west end of Galveston Island to scope out the birds before we went home from a couple of days on the island for a conference. We are familiar with Sportsman Road as it was a place Chris fished regularly while in college (we went to TAMUG) and a place I went to for a few field labs. It is a popular place to not only fish but to launch kayaks too. There were quite a few birds out in the marsh that morning and a few of them let me take their photos. These were all shot via our…
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Poking Around Campsite H | Lost Maples State Natural Area
Since our hiking mileage wasn’t large, maybe six miles or something, we took several breaks during the hike to campsite H. We got behind a slow group of hikers on a very narrow trail, stopped to check out a clematis, and refilled our water at the last place before climbing up the bluff. It was the furthest campsite out at the park and I thought maybe we’d be alone….which of course was dumb of me to think. The campsite is up a bluff and we took the long way around to see what the rest of the trail in that area looked like. Unfortunately we were mostly socked in with…