A weekend at the "Grand Canyon" of Texas

This past weekend we trekked up to the Texas Panhandle to a little place called Palo Duro Canyon. This is a place Rick has wanted to visit forever so we loaded up the truck and moved to Beverley.... oh wait, no, that's another story... we loaded up the Seal's Pilot and were off! All things considered... 7 people in a vehicle for 6 hours, etc., it was a GREAT trip! James and Rick and Tristen are all seasoned campers. I, however, haven't camped in quite a while. I do have fond memories of being harnessed to a tree as a child on most of our campouts. Ok, I don't really have that memory but my mom tells me that's how it was! She said I'd run off and she'd never see me again if she didn't! I guess Hannah comes by this naturally!

Our first job when we arrived was to set up the tents. Here, you can see Rick and James setting up what we dubbed the "Seal Chalet"... a nice little number with 2 rooms AND a front porch!


The campsite that we had was perfect! It was large and had a hill or two and HUGE rocks for the girls to climb on. Here you'll see the dads and their daughters on those rocks.


We even got in a few hikes. All Haylee could said was "I want to go climb the mountains, daddy!" Rick took the girls on a few hikes...and here is how they looked when they returned.


We did encounter some bad weather while we were there. We were told at check-in that they had been having storms come through at night. I wasn't too excited about that! The first night we got a little rain. The 2nd night we could see the storm coming. "Bob", our camp host, rode by on his little scooter to tell us that we should expect 70 mile-an-hour winds with rain, etc. Yee haw! So we rushed around and packed everything back into the U-Haul trailer we towed up there. Then we headed into our tents to wait out the storms...but not before this little fella could amble through our campsite!


I have never seen a tarantula live and in person. Let me tell you, he was U-G-L-Y! (no offense, little guy). Thankfully, he was not interested in bothering us at all. Whew! The rains and storm finally did reach us and Hannah, Haylee and Baby Kaiya slept through the whole thing! The tents shook and the rain leaked a little but we survived!

The girls had so much fun playing with Kaiya and she was such a little trooper! We are lucky to have such great friends to share tarantula sightings with! We can't wait to do it again! (not the tarantula sightings, just camping!)