Category: Life

Luna and I headed out to Hill Country State Natural Area. It’s about 10 miles outside Bandera. If you hit HAAAYYY HOLLARRRR Rd you’re almost there! It’s a pretty large area. The lady said there’s 40 miles worth of trails and over the course of 4 hours Luna and I saw 11 of those miles. For the first time ever Luna didn’t want to play fetch when we got home. Thankfully I had just enough water for us both. It wasn’t really the route I expected to take out there on the trails. I’d been wanting to go out there and I saw they had Madrone trees which sounded pretty cool. I was able to find a few (barely) and definitely found some amazing views and if I hadn’t after climbing 58 floors I’d be sad.

wow, i bet you didn’t even know this was still here! sometimes i forget myself. i really haven’t been doing a ton of exploring for a bit. usually i drive across town for a baseball game lately and that’s about it. i’ve been trying to remind myself to get out and see what else there is though.

today luna and i went to crescent bend nature park. it used to be a neighborhood until there were two 100 year floods in a 2 year period along cibolo creek (shouldn’t the neighborhood be safe for another 200 years???). my assumption is that it was a trailer park, only because there are no foundations that i saw. there are still roads and power or telephone lines, poles, fire hydrants, and even a street sign. there’s a nice trail around the park and some well traveled trails down along the creek that seems to be pretty popular for fishing.

I used 7 vacation days which should have resulted in 11 days off of work. Unfortunately I did have to work for a few hours yesterday though. I think I’ve napped twice today. In fact I’m so exhausted that I’m not even going to add pictures into this post but I will post a link to all of my pictures I have from my time off. It includes family trips to Natural Bridge Caverns and Sea World, as well as a trip for Luna and I out to South Llano River State Park. The effects of the pandemic were evident in their own unique ways. For example, at Sea World everyone had to wear masks everywhere, including on rides. Yet when I stopped at Junction Burger Company and walked in I was the only person wearing a mask, customers and staff included. The burger was pretty damn good though and the jalapeno mayo is on point.

South Llano River State Park was really pretty great and I’d love to visit it again sometime. There are a lot of trails to hike and the river is very nice. We didn’t spend as much time at the river as I planned but the hike did me in on day 2. At least on day 1 we did get our feet in. The weirdest part is during part of the year part of the park is closed for part of the day due to it being a turkey roost. After March 31 it becomes not an issue. On our first night there we got caught up in a tornado warning with marble to ice maker size hail. Luna was not a huge fan of that for sure. We ended up having to abandon the tent for the ‘shelter’ of the picnic shelter and then eventually hung out at the restrooms with many other campers until the warning subsided. After that there was a lot more hard rain. I just stayed awake petting Luna until things calmed down.

The park also has a LOT of armadillos. Probably the most I have ever seen on one camping trip. Luna was super interested in them and usually ended up at the end of her leash on her hind legs. She was also super interested in the boar we encountered (it was probably 50 yards away) that was bigger than she is. I actually thought it might have been a juvenile bear but after talking to the rangers and my park neighbor I’ve decided to just go with ‘boar’. By bigger than Luna I also mean that its legs were probably as tall as Luna. Overall though, Luna was great on the trip and loves the adventure.

Well, as promised, here is a link for some pics and videos (hope it works). They include the cavern, sea world, camping, armadillos, screenshots of what my garmin recorded on the camping trip (i think Sea World day was another 10 miles), and screenshots of the constellations I saw so clear.

Spring Break 2021 (Natural Bridge Caverns, Sea World, South Llano River State Park)

Hopefully it’s the only snow day or I’ll have to come up with some new names. As I’m typing this Luna may be tracking snow in and out, I don’t know. When I left the dog door closed she was like WTF so I was like WTFever. Here are some pictures and videos of the snow and Luna. **disclaimer: i broke the email while trying to reconfigure it and was too lazy to put it back to the old setup. i’ll be working on a fix this week**