It was pretty stormy in the state last weekend, so Abby, Gina and I took a trip on Sunday to check out Falling Water Falls in the Ozark National Forest between Ben Hur and Witts Springs. We also stopped by Six Finger Falls a few miles downstream. I wasn’t feeling very photographically inspired so I don’t have much to show. We had a good time, though. Abby caught a huge terrapin turtle and we saw a little snake, so she got her Bindi the Jungle Girl on a little bit.
I’ll admit that I’m not much of camper. I love going out into the wilderness and rambling around and I’ll camp out if that’s the only way I’ll be able to visit some places, but I don’t like it. The whole camping thing is just such a hassle. Screwing with ice chests and camp stoves and flashlights and cooking outdoors and not bathing and participating in different bathroom routines is all bothersome but not really that big a deal. The thing that gets me is the tent. First you have to put the damn thing up and arrange some kind of bedding. Then you have to hope it doesn’t rain (admittedly not a great danger in the desert). Then to get up to pee in the middle of the night you have to use to the preternaturally loud zipper, which wakes up your tentmate(s) and possibly other nearby campers. And, if you’re in a campground, to pee in the night you have to put on pants and shoes and walk to the restroom. In addition, there’s the dish washing in cold water and the constant not being able to find things. Eventually you have to take down the tent and put up the bedding. It just sucks.
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We got all rested up on Day 2 and we were ready to tackle some more desert hiking on Day 3 (or at least I was). We planned to meet Dale and Amber at 8 a.m. at the Pine Canyon trail head, but we got off to a late start after another rough night in the tent. A gale blew up and pummeled our cheapo Wal-Mart tent for hours. If you’ve never slept in a tent with a 35 mph wind blowing then you haven’t lived, my friend. I finally went to sleep around 1 a.m. and Gina was awake until the wind calmed down sometime around 3. Plus we had to take down our tent and pack up because checkout of the campsite was at noon. So we showed up at the trail a little over an hour late. Luckily Dale and Amber got there only about 30 minutes before we did and were inclined to wait for us. There’s very little cellular reception in the park, so we couldn’t communicate with each other. We were all going on plans we’d made the last time we saw each other two days earlier.
I had another long hike planned for the second day at Big Bend National Park, but the hike the afternoon before wore Gina and me out pretty good. Plus we had some inconsiderate campers in the site next to ours and they were whooping it up late into the night. At about 11 p.m. they were talking loudly about the cobbler they were cooking in a Dutch oven. Only about 15 yards separated them from the nearest other campers – us, and several other campsite were close by, but they acted as if they were 100 miles from other people. A little bit of excitement ensued earlier in the evening when a skunk invaded their campsite. To top it all off, they started being loud at about daylight. So they were the last thing we heard before going to sleep and the first thing we heard upon waking up.
We decided to scrap any plans for strenuous hiking for the day and instead went for drive on the west side of the park to see what we could see.
It only took 14 years, but I finally talked Gina into returning to Big Bend National Park for a camping trip. Her first trip, in 1996, got off to a shaky start when we rolled into the campground and the thermometer at the little store showed 114 degrees. In hindsight, it’s clear that visiting the desert during the last week of May is a bad idea if you’re not a big fan of heat. Then there was the fact that we went there in my little Ford Ranger that didn’t have air conditioning. Then there was the late-night incident with the javelina. Then there was the sandstorm that blew in and drove tiny grains of sand through the tent fabric, coating us in grit. We cut the trip short after three days and fled back to comparatively mild Little Rock.
This time, with a March trip planned, the weather promised to be much more reasonable and it was. It was even pretty chilly during the nights. Granted, I haven’t been many places in my life, but Big Bend is the most beautiful, scenic and downright neatest place I’ve ever been. This trip was my third to the park. I shot about 500 pictures and have picked out about 40 to put on the blog, so I’m going to dole them out over the next few days as I find time to get the photos processed. If you want to stretch you’re imagination, you can pretend I’m doing these entries in real time even though the trip was actually last week. I recommend you do that.
I hate putting up a tent. I don’t know why. It’s not that difficult. We’re going on an epic camping trip soon so I got the old tent out to see if was still in good shape and I immediately got a little short with Gina and Abby due to my dislike of tent erection.
We’re headed to Big Bend, which is in a really isolated part of Texas. In anticipation of being in a good area for photographing star trails I bought a cheapo intervalometer for my camera. When I started playing around with it I got the idea to do a time-lapse deal of me putting up our tent out in the middle of the desert. But I needed to practice on something and decided that the dry-run tent set-up would be the perfect time to practice for the real thing. So I set the intervalometer to take a picture every 8 seconds and made two videos, one of the tent set-up and one of the tent take down. The camera shot about 100 frames each time and I combined them in iMovie to make the video. They turned out well and included Abby and Gina in incidental roles, so I felt obliged to include them on this album. They go like this here:
We stormed Branson a couple of weekends ago to spend time with Mimi and Pawpaw. Mimi got us another sweet suite at the resort where she works.
Abby had her first soccer practice on Saturday. It was like somebody dropped a cute bomb on that field.
