Jeana and I have been wanting to go camping since we moved to Texas. I was given a new tent for father’s day which is big enough for the whole family, so all we needed was a free weekend. The planets aligned last weekend and we got some of our friends (the Birds) to come along with us.
The kids had fun exploring the cow pasture we camped in (Oxford Ranch). We got there just before dark, so they didn’t have much time to explore a whole lot. They were hungry because we got there late and the tin-foil dinners / Ramen noodles didn’t cook as fast as chicken nuggets in the microwave. Audrey fell asleep really fast once she got in the tent. Kate roamed around in the tent looking out the screen door at the adults talking around the camp fire. When we finally decided to go to bed too, I found Kate lying at Audrey’s feet where she must have just gotten tired of watching out the screen door.
The night was great, until about 12.30am. I’ll spare the reader of a play-by-play of the night, but I will say that about every hour from 12.30am Audrey woke up to say, “I’m thirsty.” The problem with this is that we put all our food and water in the back of the Jeep so that we had no problems with critters and animals trying to get it from our campsite. Neither Jeana nor I wanted to get out of the tent to go get a water bottle, so we kept telling Audrey to go back to sleep.
Finally, Jeana had reached her limit of Audrey asking, and of me not doing anything about the thirst problem and went for a water bottle at 6.30am. Five minutes later Audrey tells me, “I think I’m going to throw up!” I reacted much faster to these words that I did to “I’m thirsty.” We got out of the tent and Audrey vomited on our tarp and the ground next to the tarp. Poor Audrey. After that, she slept great.
Our intent was to camp at Enchanted Rock State Park and then go rock climbing on Saturday. The reason we camped at Oxford Ranch (i.e. the cow pasture) was because the camp sites at Enchanted Rock were all reserved and Oxford Ranch was the closest camping to the park I could find. We ate breakfast, broke camp, hit the road, and arrived at Enchanted Rock around 11am.
Enchanted Rock was nice. I’d like to go again when we can camp in the park and spend more time. By the time we got there, most of the climbing spots were occupied. We found one spot to climb on that was vacant, and realized why when I got up on the granite rock and could not find anything to hold on to! Jeana tried and was met with the same outcome. Lesson learned: reserve your camp site well in advance and camp in the park.
