Camping

We had a pretty good time camping this weekend. We went to Martin Dies Jr. SP near Jasper, TX. It was cloudy all weekend, so going out and playing on the lake was pretty much a no-go. It was cold enough to make having a fire really pleasant, so we spent a lot of time clustered around the fire talking and playing cards. We took the dogs out on two ~3 mile walks, thereby pretty much exploring the entire trail system in the park. The park is pretty stereotypically east Texas. There is a lot of swamp and trees. The trails go over some bridges on the verges of the reservoir. Roxy is apparently scared of walking over things she can see through. She would crouch down low and kind of slink across the bridges. She was running around the top of one just fine until she looked through the cracks between the boards and saw the water ~6 feet below her. Then she got scared and started slinking again. Zoya has no such problems - I was just glad she didn't try to jump off into the murky, probably alligator infested water.

Apparently, the lake is polluted. There were signs saying that an adult shouldn't eat more than 2 meals of the fish per month or risk mercury poisoning. You gotta love industrialization. And though the park was pretty, in a swampy, eerie sort of way, I just don't enjoy hiking through densely wooded areas as much as when I can get above everything else and get a good view. I was longing for the Rockies pretty much through the whole hike. Sigh.

Anyway, I got a couple of pictures for reference, and I'll post them from home later.

In other news, I have to work the graveyard shift for a sim tomorrow night, so I'm in this weird sleep shifting schedule this week. It won't be bad at all getting through the shift, I don't think. What I'm expecting to be tough is getting a full work week in after the sim. I have a plan - we'll see if it works.