Hiking in Colorado Bend State Park

Full disclosure: I skipped my 9:00am class this morning to read the Hollingsworth v. Perry transcript from yesterday and catch up on blogging. Gotta love life as a 3L. 
Anyway, I'm back with Part Two of our super-quick Hill Country vacay! (Part One - wineries and Llano, TX!)
After a lovely breakfast at Walden Plantation on Friday, we set off for Colorado Bend State Park! 

We packed a picnic lunch of peanut butter sandwiches (picnics are hard on non-meat Fridays during Lent!), and we spent the day hiking to Gorman Falls, Gorman Creek, and Gorman Springs! 





We hiked the trail to the waterfall first. The scenery was beautiful (in it's own kind of lots-of-cacti-and-rocks way). 







About halfway down the trail to the waterfall we spotted this little guy: 

We stopped for a while at a pretty overlook and took a photo of the two of us using this awesome travel tripod (a Christmas gift from Jeff).



Poor Jeff was wearing his hiking boots (which were originally purchased in his Boy Scout days about ten years ago!), and the soles of them started to just fall off. He fixed it with medical tape from our First Aid kit at first, but as the day went on, they just peeled off more and more, and by the end of our hike the rubber soles had completely detached from the shoes, and he was left wearing just the upper part like a pair of moccasins! I knew he was annoyed by it, but I couldn't help but laugh. The shoes were promptly thrown in the garbage when we got home! Haha. 

I tried my best to be a good waterfall photographer when we got to Gorman Falls, but it was like 2:00pm and the sun was shining in all the wrong places and I just couldn't seem to capture the prettiness in photographic form! Buying a fancy camera definitely does not make you a fancy photographer. Haha. I Googled "waterfall photos" when we got home and found out that apparently you have to do it at dawn/dusk with a polarizing filter in order to get a good shot. Oops. 






After we stopped and ate lunch at Gorman Falls, we hiked the trail to Gorman Spring. The scenery was much more interesting than the Gorman Falls trail!





The little travel tripod came in handy again! 

Here's Gorman Spring... we were expecting dripping water or bubbles coming up from the ground or something, but really it just looked like a small lake. Haha. A little anticlimactic, but the views on the way there were worth the trip. 

After that, we had a long hike back to the car, past everything we had already seen. Exciting stuff. Haha. 

On our way out of the park, we had to stop in the middle of the road and wait for these cows to cross. Gotta love Texas!


We went back to the bed and breakfast, got all cleaned up, and went to dinner at Stonewall's in Llano. Friday night all-you-can-eat catfish = perfect for Lent!

(source)

Up next, we take a detour to San Antonio on the way home to see Aunt Lucy!