Guadalupe River State Park

 I enjoyed visiting my daughter's church this morning. Very friendly. Even people who didn't see I was with her introduced themselves. When they found out I was her mom, each one told me how much they loved her. "Me, too," was my answer.

After church we went to Lupe's Tortillas for lunch. They told us it would be a twenty minute wait. It was thirty minutes. And then we waited an hour for our food. Delicious, but it really ate into our afternoon. It was 4 PM before we arrived at the park. Fortunately, it gets dark way later here than at home.

Beautiful place.

We did a lot of scrambling. Note to self: When hiking, assume we will do some scrambling even if someone tells you the trails are level and don't need more than sneakers. Wear boots.

The scramble was well worth it!

My daughter has a cat she has taken on camping trips at times. He's still getting used to the leash.

He spent more time in the backpack which expands into a little tent when we take breaks.

The sun had gone down by the time we left. Great day. 

Lots of cool campsites to come back to.

A Couple Texas State Parks

This is not a major road trip, but I'm spending a long weekend with my daughter in San Antonio, Texas. Since we are all avid hikers, we took off Saturday morning for a couple state parks that have become favorites. The forecast for today had been thunderstorms. As you can see from the pictures, they did not materialize.

Blanco State Park is small, but it's only about a half hour from their apartment (or would have been if construction traffic out of San Antonio hadn't been so bad.)

We did a couple short hikes along the river. There are some really nice campsites and a swimming hole.

The main goal of the day was Pedernales Falls State Park, further away but well worth the trip. After a picnic lunch, we hiked down to the swimming area. The water looked pretty slimey at this time of year, and we weren't tempted even if the sun had come out. There were lots of rocks to scramble on.

And wonderful cypress trees along the river bank.

My daughter warned me that the "falls" is not much of a waterfall at this time of year although it is subject to flash floods when all this would be a raging torrent. We could see striations in the some of the rocks where debris has been repeatedly dragged across. It doesn't look like I took any pictures of potholes, but there were plenty. A lot of them looked like elephant footprints.

The fun for a ten-year-old (and his mom and grammie) was scrambling on, under, and through rocks. They entered the larger opening at the bottom

Then they scrambled up this chimney to come out on top.

The place they were most anxious to take me is the large dark opening in the middle of this picture.

It was challenging to find our way across the rocks to a place where we could actually reach the opposite shore. They had discovered on a previous visit that the hole is not a cave, but a tunnel to approach from the back. We picked our way through rocks and scrub to the back side.

That turned out to be more difficult than the actual climb.

The view was definitely worth it. We sat a while in the opening and heard a child on the far side saying, "Daddy! Daddy! I wanna go to the cave!"

By the time we made our way back down the sun was disappearing--a full hour later than it would have in January at home up north.

We didn't begin to investigate the many hiking trails in this park. All three of us were wishing we were headed back to a campsite, rather than the city. Sigh.  Next time.