Spring Travels: Day 3

Today we headed north to Palo Duro State Park for the day. We headed out after breakfast with the plan to eat an early lunch when we arrived, then explore. Before we got out of Caprock Canyons State Park, we were able to get close enough for a few pictures of the buffalo at Caprock. There were several calves, but they hid behind the adults and were hard to photograph.

At Palo Duro, we saw a wild turkey as we headed toward a picnic area.

After a quick lunch, we took enough Junior Naturalist booklets for each of the kids to fill them out to earn the park's ranger patch. We hiked into the canyons and enjoyed the beautiful rock formations.

Throughout the trails, we would stop to read about the geology or history or natural history and the kids would fill in the blanks of their booklets.

Every day of our trip needs to have some sort of adventure, right? Today, certain unnamed adults thought it would be a great idea to take the kids up the side of the mountain. (That was NOT my idea, and I kept my feet firmly at the bottom.)

photo by Ben

After all of them descended, we hiked some more. After a few minutes of walking, I heard glass shattering and saw that Ben was standing in a pile of broken glass. I told him to get away from it so he didn't get hurt, and the crazy kid reached into his pants pockets and proceeded to pull out handfuls of glass shards from both pockets. I grabbed him and shook him upside down to get it out faster -- it didn't work. We eventually made our way back to the scenic overview at the visitor center and museum. The kids filled in the rest of their booklets at the museum and turned in their work to the Ranger and they each got a beautiful patch.

We drove a few miles into Canyon (the town) for dinner at a Thai restaurant. On our way out of Canyon, the Kaiser crew detoured a few blocks to show the kids the first house Allen and I bought. It looked mostly the same, but different enough that we didn't take a picture. We got back to our tents at Caprock Canyon in time to get ready for bed. Somehow, all the kids stayed awake for the hour and a half drive home, but it didn't take long for all of them to be snoozing.