Sweet Things Come in Small Packages

Coming back home from another perfect weekend, with the southern draw of Matthew McConaughey's voice performing his new book, Greenlights, pouring out from the speakers in the truck; the sun is slowly dipping down into the western sky, the fields to the left and right of the roads we're on glistening as the winter wheat sways under the ever lengthening shadows of the sparse trees dotting the landscape with their finally-color-changing leaves.  

Oh, how I wish you were here!

The entire trip to Mother Neff State Park this weekend was magical.  I've been excited to come over to this park for a long time - it's the first in the state parks' system: donating the original six acres in her will in 1921, Isobella Neff had a vision that didn't yet have a structure, but her son, Pat, who eventually became governor, created the state parks system with her bequest.  Nearly 100 years later, the park has been thru extensive flooding from the Leon river and in 2012 was granted funds for a multi-million dollar renovation.  And y'all, it shows!

We came in Friday afternoon, and as the sun set eerie fog rose amongst the campground.  The weather was going thru a shift - in fact, by Sunday evening the camp host, Kathy, dropped by to tell us there was a freeze warning and a few hints on how to weather the cold overnight.  

Yes, it was 45*... and yes, it was 4:32 am.  One of the "joys" of camping with Diesel is that occasionally, he gets into a weird pattern of needing to relive himself in the middle of the night, and since RDB is such a sound sleeper, it's Dog Mom who gets up and goes out with him.

Saturday morning (ok, late morning) we went out geocaching in the park.  There are about 3.5 miles of trails, with lots of terrain and beautiful views.  Since this is a prior CCC park, there are also a number of interesting structures along the way.

Several of the geocaches will lead you to those CCC structures, like the tower above. The view from up there was really beautiful as the storms had just passed thru.  

(By the way! We found our 50th geocache this trip!  I wrote up a bit more detail about that here. Go check it out!)

The park also has a natural feature - a cave (or overhang) that the Native American tribes used before the land was settled by early Americans. 

It was a nice relaxing kinda weekend - we only left the campground to go into town for a few additional groceries.... and no, I didn't need a sculpted butter turkey, but I had to have it!  (I know, random.  And it's still sitting in my fridge because, well, I don't want to cut his head off!)

And we just happened to see our neighbor (aka Sasquatch) on the way, too... 

We're really looking forward to the end of January when we're camping with KD & the Vowels at one of our favorite parks - Texas State Railroad in Rusk - but we would sure love to bring them back over to this one as well.  We were so impressed with the sites: they had raked out the crushed granite on each site between check in and check out.  

And apart from all the trails that we enjoyed, the park has a great kids playground just a short walk from the camping loop.

There's even a Little Free Library on site - and y'all gotta know, that just totally made me happy!

With the weather turning chill, we really enjoyed hanging out in the camper, all decorated for Christmas, cooking dinner in the crockpot and watching Christmas movies on Netflix.

I've mentioned before that dog is spoiled rotten, right? Heated blanket, my seat on the couch and all.  (Still wouldn't have it any other way.).  I mean, how could you not swoon over this handsome face? 

One last walk around the loop before we left out Monday afternoon - it was neat to just catch out of the corner of my eye one of the cactus bushes and the heart shapes that the pads made.  

 

We love nature, nature loves us back - prickly and all.  

We were at Mother Neff State Park, site #20.  Beautifully level - though we did use a set of legos to get just-about-perfect side to side.  The entire loop is full hook-ups, and with only 20 sites total, it's a really popular park. Speaking of which, on Saturday as we were out and about geocaching and hiking, there were times that we had to shift plans about which trails to take as the parking at the trailheads was sparse.  Good news though, Sunday afternoon the park cleared out and we had our choice of where to park and hike to. Internet service here was a 2.  (0 - no internet, 1 - there's some, but it's not good, 2 - there's internet and it's workable, 3 - the internet was excellent).

For more camping photos, go here.