Tuesday, August 14, 2007

First Time Camping

Well, summer time is almost over. The family is in need of some adventure. My husband had been wanting to go camping for years, but I had never done it and the prospect of going camping in the Texas heat never held any appeal for me. This year I said, lets go for it. At first we talked about going to a little camp site one town over that he use to go to when he was a kid. Then I remembered stopping to go horseback riding through a canyon in Texas as a break on a road trip to Colorado. We looked online and the scenery was inspiring, so we decided to go 11 hours away to go camping in Palo Duro Canyon.

We left very early in the morning, so we could get there in time for check in and so we could get our new tent set up before dark. We found a site with a good amount of shade. It was hot, but breezy. As long as the breeze was moving it was pretty comfortable. There was supposed to be no rain for the entire time we were there, so of course the second afternoon there was a thunderstorm. We got soaked, the river flooded, the water came within 10 feet of our tent. We had to spend a couple of hours in our tent, but the skies cleared by the evening. It was a good thing we didn't have a camp site deeper in the canyon, because the water crossings flooded. The water was 5 feet over the road. There was a family that had the teenagers at camp and the adults in town, the adults were trapped on the opposite side of the water from the teens for the night. By the next afternoon, you could barely tell that it had rained.

We saw all manner of wildlife, a groundhog, deer and turkey (they walked right into camp many times), cardinals, hawks, spiders, butterflies, etc. And in Don's case, a giant tarantula. I've decided that I can't wait to go camping again. I will post some pictures when I get them uploaded on this computer.

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