Day 275: Donatello Goes Camping

It's been a little while since my last update. I've been mostly off the internet for over a week. Part of that was due to the fact that I was wrapped up in Mass Effect 2 for a week, but the other reason is because my wife and I went camping for a few days last week.

We had made plans to visit some family, but it ended up not working out so instead we decided to take a last minute camping trip for a couple of days at Garner State Park about three hours from where we live in Austin, TX. We also decided to bring our dog, Master Samwise the Brave since he's never been camping with us.

The park turned out to be really nice and because it was the middle of the week we had practically the whole place to ourselves. We got a spot right near the river so we were never more than a short walk away from the water.

The first night we were there we didn't have any food to cook for ourselves so we drove a few miles down the road towards a small town and we found an awesome bar called Buckhorn. There were only five other people in the bar when we got there including the owners. The woman behind the bar offered to make us some food and told us we just missed an amazing musician auditioning to play at the bar later in the week. As we were eating he decided to play some songs for us and it was amazing! We got a free private show and we did a little dancing. He really was good and it turned out to be a great bit of luck that we stopped in.

The next day there were a bunch of hiking paths throughout the park that we had access to. We were both amazed by how well Sam did on the trails. He is easily the clumsiest dog I have ever seen, but on the steep, rocky hiking trails he was like a freaking mountain goat! He did better than we did and by the end of the day he was beat. We tried to get him to swim a bit, but he wouldn't voluntarily go any deeper than his chest. I put him in a little further a couple of times, but he instantly turned and swam back to the shore.

The night before we left it stormed pretty bad, but we stayed nice and dry in our tent that we affectionately named "Tent Mansion" when we bought it for a camping trip to Marfa, TX last year with some friends. It fit two full sized air mattresses with room to spare in Marfa, and this time with just us and the dog it seemed even more huge.

After we packed up it was a bit of a bummer to come back to the real world, but it was a pretty great mini-camping trip and I'd definitely like to go back to Garner State Park for another visit.