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Saturday October 14 & Sunday the 15th. One national Park, seven state parks, two times leaving due to alligators, one turn around due to treacherous cliff, one table of skulls, one night sleeping on a wooden bunk bed, three entrance bracelets and hundreds of butterflies.

It started at 3am with a plan to drive five and a half hours to Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park for the archeology festival.

I arrived in Southern Texas too early and before the 9am opening time of the national park and so I started my journey at the nearby Resaca De La Palma State Park instead.

This was a very nice location and I wish that I had spent more time here rather than treating it like a time killer.

This park is popular with the bird watchers, but we’ll discuss this topic further as I learn more about the reasoning later

Gather a bit of swag, get my state park stamp and head back on the trail to the national park.

Slight delay due to a train.

Got here a bit before 9 still so I wandered around for a bit while folks set up their tables.

There’s not a nice way to say it… This event was a bust for me. There were three areas hosting guests. The outside open area had the battlefield guests and this is not a topic that interests me, so I went inside to find the archaeology folks, but only found clubs recruiting.

I was about to leave, but then I saw the corner of a table set up behind the building and they had bones!

I chatted with the bone guy for a bit. He was patient with my clear lack of knowledge and was kind enough to walk me through various bone facts. An interesting topic for sure and the closest thing to archeology that I ran into at this location.

I was lucky enough to walk in on a ranger giving a talk about the location and its history when I first arrived and so between starting with that and ending with the bones, it was an okay trip…

And then I bought the wrong sticker for my national park passport. Again. I have ordered the correct sticker through the mail and I am currently waiting for its arrival.

My original plan from here was to work my way back North towards home, but when I opened my map of the state and national parks in Texas I noticed that there weren’t many locations along that route.

At this point, remembering that I still had a tent, blankets and a pillow in the trunk from last week I decided that I could probably find a place to set up camp for the night and choose to follow the border of Mexico to the next state park rather than head towards home.What could go wrong?

And so I arrived at Estero Llano Grande State Park and the bird folks were here, just like at the last state park.

And so I wandered the park.

It turns out that birding is popular here due to it being an area where migrating birds pass through.

I would like to learn more about this hobby and I spent some time focusing on the birds that I could find, though my cell phone camera was no match for the tripods and professional cameras that many others were carrying.

Wanting to get some real hiking in I chose to follow the signs that said Alligator Lake.

And then the alligator life became real…

And I turned around and went back to the park’s shop area. The solar eclipse was about to happen.

I decided I wasn’t much interested in the eclipse and so I drove to the next state park, Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park.

This day became more and more interesting as it went on.

Keanu says “Hi.”