Last month, we explored a state park we hadn’t been to yet, as part of my ambitious camping plan I planned out last fall. The older boys opted to spend the weekend at Grandma’s house. Somehow this was preferable to spending the weekend in close quarters with us, which might be a sign that we have been camping too much as a family lately. It was nice to not have to worry about two additional sets of needs, though, as we had the dogs with us and a two year old is enough to worry about.
I do think we will need to come back sometime with the older ones, though. There were rocks to jump off of and swimming holes and all kinds of fun for able bodied strong swimmers. It was not the greatest place to camp with a two year old, though. He enjoyed the water, but we were stressing about his safety around it.
The rocky areas were hard for me to walk in, given my ankle injury from years back. I think Breeze liked it, but Scout was hating every minute. She loves the water, but him not so much (one is a retriever and one is a herder – makes sense, right?) Scout is just too old and feeble now to go camping, so this will probably go down as his last big hurrah.
It was Easter weekend, which I don’t think I realized when I booked it, and then I felt bad about depriving Sebastian of Easter egg hunting experiences, so we left the park on Saturday morning and drove fifteen minutes away to a rec center in south Austin to participate in an Easter festival. What we learned this day: he doesn’t like cotton candy, he is very interested in hula hoops and ping pong games, Easter egg hunts aren’t really that much fun anymore because of the chaos that ensues, and he is scared of generally all characters dressed in full suit costumes (no Easter Bunny pictures for this guy). On one of the evenings we were there, we left the park again to go eat some Mexican food and then watch planes arrive and take off from the Austin airport at the family viewing area. Good times.
On the in-betweens, when Sebastian wasn’t napping, we went for short hikes to explore the park. We would have taken longer ones, but poor Scout just couldn’t hang. We saw a big group heading out to do a Yoga Hike, which kind of sounded fun to me, but maybe later on in my life (probably something I should have done earlier in my life). We saw flowers and water and rock formations, and did not really find any birds or geocaches this time around. Perhaps we are changing our focus. Overall, it was a pretty park and a good time to visit, but probably won’t be one we spend lots of time at, although I do want to let the older boys see what it like to jump off the rock formations into the water like we saw others doing. Perhaps we will do this on a day trip or a stop on the way somewhere else.
Here are some scenes from the park:
We popped in there once when Forest was a few months old, on our way back from another excursion in Austin. It is on our list to hit up again at some point, but sounds like maybe in another year or two!