Hillsborough River State Park

The launch

A beautiful November day on a beautiful river

The hawk. I thought I had some better close up pictures, but they were all blurry.

A little blue heron and a turtle sharing a log.

Randy carried each of the kids over to inspect a

little tree frog warming up on a leaf in the sun.

The little tree frog warming up.

We spent another enjoyable weekend at Hillsborough River State Park. I must say though, it was pretty cold each night. The days were gorgeous and warm, but about 4 AM was pretty coldy! Needless to say, I slept well in my own bed last night.

I've already got the first load of laundry in the machine this morning...there is a mountain of laundry. Everything we took smells strongly of campfire, so even the blankets and such need to be washed. Yeah for me.

The only pictures I took were on our canoe trip on Saturday. We enjoyed a beautiful lazy trip up and then down a stretch of the slow moving Hillsborough River. We saw a number of interesting things, but I think our favorite was the hawk eating a snake. (If we were Aztec or Mayan, that might mean we were destined for royalty or at least royal enough for some hot cocoa.) Reed, the lover of reptiles, was quite upset that the hawk was eating a snake. In his mind, snakes are much higher on the "cool list" than hawks and, therefore, should not be prey.

I'm glad we went and glad to be home...the mark of a success camping trip. I considered, briefly, letting some of the air out of the air mattress or dripping water on Randy's pillow to make his tent experience REALLY awful in an effort to boost my campaign for a pop-up camper. But it would have upset my night sleep too so, obviously, I couldn't do it. The cold nights and restless kids did help my cause some. We'll see.