Texas Becomes Our New Camping Playground

Chapter 16 of my work-in-progress camping memoir

Our kids running to explore Goliad State Park, Texas, May 2016. Photo by Sarah Styf

I started working on a camping memoir five years ago but abandoned it after a year of detailed work because the time just wasn’t right. Now I am ready to get back to the work I started and turn it into a true memoir of the first 21 years of marriage and parenting. If you want to get regular updates on this project, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

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We loved our Indiana state parks. Over our years of living in Indiana, the state park system taught us over and over again that Indiana was more than just cornfields and basketball.

So when we moved to Texas, we were excited to see what the Texas State Park system had to offer. But moving is hard for a lot of reasons, and while we were happy where we were, it took us a long time to feel like we were really settled in. We got a taste of Texas state parks while hiking and exploring at Martin Dies Jr. State Park during our first spring break in the state, and we make sure to get our yearly state park pass while we were there, but we didn’t get to camp at our first Texas State Park until our first May in Texas.

We were still learning that May in Texas can be as hot as summers up north, but that didn’t matter to us as we headed a couple hours down the road to Goliad State Park. Like we had learned with Indiana, we were quickly learning that Texas landscapes were more than just cacti and desert. We lived in a region full of beautiful vegetation, and as we hiked around the state park to the west of us, we discovered a mix of cacti and tall oak and cypress trees. We took a walk with a park ranger who talked about the wildlife in the park, Ethan asking question after question about snakes, something I had no desire to know about, and Lydia watching for the footprints of different wild animals. We toured the old mission, taking in the history of the region before hiking to the Presidio La Bahia, the site of the massacre that was second half of the Texas Independence battle cry: “Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!” In addition to taking in the sites and sounds of nature, we learned more about the history of our new state, a history our kids would soon start learning in school.

And after a day of hiking in the warm, and then hot, sunshine, we built a campfire and looked up to big, starry, Texas nighttime sky. It didn’t take us long to discover that there was a reason for the song lyrics, “The stars at night, are big and bright.” The last time I had seen that many stars at night was when my family lived in Wyoming and we would look up into a sky completely void of light pollution. Texas may have several large cities and we may have lived within miles of the fourth largest city in the United States, but one doesn’t have to travel far before they can escape from the sights and sounds of the city, revealing breathtaking night skies.

The following September, hungry for a weekend away and still a little frustrated from the lack of a truly relaxing family vacation, we made reservations at Lake Livingston State Park, which was a little over an hour from our home. We still didn’t understand that September in Texas is much hotter than we were used to up north, but we were hungry for an escape, so away we went. The heat was still too oppressive for long morning hikes and nighttime campfires, but we did spend some time together as a family checking out the lake overviews, canoeing on the water, and taking the kids to the nature center so that we could escape the heat. While the September experience was far from everything we would want, over the next five years, Lake Livingston became one of our favorite places to go when we needed a quick weekend away.

When both of our kids started soccer during our second spring in Texas, it cut into our potential spring camping time. Our first time out was to Arkansas for spring break; another camping trip had to wait until May. We somehow managed to plan a camping trip during the last beautiful weekend before the arrival of summer temperatures that would last us until October. We invited our next-door neighbors, who have a son Ethan’s age and a daughter who is two years younger. In the six years we lived next to each other, they became second family. Lydia adopting their daughters as little sisters (they would have one more little girl in the time that we lived next door) and Ethan and their son loving and fighting like brothers. All of the kids were thrilled that we were all going camping together.

Of course, I don’t know that I can say that everyone was thrilled about the trip. Taking friends camping is a new level of friendship intimacy and we were taking a huge gamble. Mick had fond memories of camping as a kid, but Ang, despite being raised in Colorado surrounded by outdoor activities of all kinds, had never been camping before. She nervously accepted everyone’s excitement but was having a difficult time sharing in their excitement. When we returned from our camping trip, we still had to live next door to them.

We needed this weekend to go well. Yes, we wanted our neighbors to have fun, but we also wanted to still be friends when we got home.

We headed to Mission Tejas State Park, about two hours north of Houston. We got there before our neighbors and set up the entire camp, including setting up the Tent-Mahal right outside of our own tent. They didn’t arrive until well after dark, but at that point the only thing they still had to do was unload their clothes and bedding. We struggled to get excited kids into bed so that the adults could spend some time talking around a campfire without the interruption of our kids.

The next day we set out to show our friends why we found so much joy in spending an entire weekend in the outdoors. The dads took the kids to the camp office and picked up explorer packs for the kids and GPS units so that we could complete the geocache challenge that someone had set up in the park ages ago. We hiked and searched for the hidden metal boxes, the kids excitedly searching for the treasure all over the park. We crossed bridges and climbed pine tree lined hills. We hiked along the lake and looked at the maps to decide which path to take next. We walked through the historical replica buildings to see what living on the Texas frontier was like over a hundred years before. I nervously watched the dads and all of the kids climbing through brush and praying that no one stepped on a rattlesnake or copperhead and thankful that they all came out from their geocache hunt happy and unharmed. The kids climbed on playground equipment and willingly headed on yet another trail, eager to see if they would find something better to exchange in yet another geocache box. And the adults enjoyed the time disconnected from cell phones that couldn’t find a signal a couple of hours away from the northern reaches of the greater Houston area.

That night the kids helped to build another fire, we made the mandatory camping s’mores, and all of the kids crawled into bed late but happy. Jeff and I sat up with Mick and Ang and talked under a starry night sky until both wives were falling asleep in our camping chairs; we both headed to bed long before our husbands were ready to call it a night.

By the time we left, we could say that we had all had fun together. Jeff and I knew it could be a good weekend and we were satisfied that when we returned home that Sunday afternoon and finished unpacking all of our weekend equipment, we would still be friends sending our children back and forth between our houses.