Simonton After the Storm

I thought we were headed to Lake Jackson today.

But last night, the long rumored storm that was coming finally hit.  Or should I say this morning.  About five am, we were listening to the wind and rain pounding the side of the house and talking half coherently about how bad it was supposed to be, and I was realizing that we were probably not going to the bird sanctuary and hiking today like we planned.

But we can’t stay inside long.  We just aren’t made like that.  So as soon as the rain stopped, around 10 am, we headed out to Simonton to check on some caches we placed out there last week.

This is the path near one of them, the third of three in a short series highlighting different views of the Brazos River.

Simonton is a sleepy little town about 12 miles from us.  The city hall and fires station are about the tiniest ones I have ever seen, and mostly it is a farming community.  There are some unique businesses around the area, and a lot of country roads.  We like to drive around out that way looking for hawks, and lately we’ve gotten into hiding caches out there as well.

Usually the FTF (First to Find) competition is very steep in this area.  When a new cache is published, you can be that within 15 minutes, the FTF hounds will descend upon it like vultures. But for some reason, this one has not been found yet.  Perhaps because people assumed that the guy who went out to find the other two found it as well?  He didn’t, because he slipped in the mud and it was raining and he didn’t look very hard.  But it is there.  Really close to here:

I am trying to figure out what plant that is with the pink buds, but that might take me a while.  I am not very knowledgeable about plants and I don’t have a reference book.

The Brazos looked higher, but not by much, but the gullies and fields were full of water. Retention ponds were doing their jobs well.  We think the sky must have dropped 6″ inches of water between last night and this morning.  We stopped by this place below, were on the way out, we saw a woman and a child standing with umbrellas.  In their place now were water birds, thinking this was a lake shore and not a sidewalk I guess.

The birds flew away as we got closer, so the perception of the water height is not as strong in this next picture, but you can see the egrets here:

This area is actually Fulshear, which lies between Katy and Simonton.  We had breakfast there in the morning, at a place called All Stars, which has become like our favorite mediocre diner.  It’s close and convenient to our country explorations.

Tonight we are headed to a geocaching meetup in the forest at night, in an area that is prone to flooding, so this should be interesting.  We bought big galoshes in anticipation.  Hopefully it will end up being something worth writing about as well.