The Stars at Night are Big and Bright

I am not sure that it counts as "Deep in the Heart of Texas" when we were nearly on the Oklahoma border, but the skies were glorious both nights during our stay this past weekend  at Lake Arrowhead State Park southeast of Wichita Falls.  It is actually one of the few state parks in the area we had never visited.  (It had no geocaches until relatively recently.)

We left early on Friday afternoon in Silver.  We pulled out of the RV storage area at 4:30 and were registered and hooked up in the campsite by 7:15 despite the very slow Friday afternoon traffic between Lewisville and Denton and some exploring of the park in order to pick our campsite.  We had hoped to make it by then, since 7:15 was sunset.  Gotta love daylight savings time!

I had started a batch of beef stew in the thermal cooker earlier in the day, so dinner was ready with no further preparation.  The inner pot went into the outer pot at 2:30:  the inner pot was still too hot to touch without a hotpad when we sat down to dinner at 7:30, with the meat fork tender and falling apart.

After cleaning up from dinner we went outside to enjoy the gloriously beautiful evening and were overcome with all of the stars.  It was one of the darkest parks we had ever been in...no street lights and no light pollution from nearby cities. That coupled with the unusually low humidity and no moon made for a stunningly full star field.  There were so many stars that it was nearly impossible to pick out the constellations. We could not decide which was the pole star, but we could easily see the Milky War.  Go figure! 

We spent the next day and a half exploring the park on bike and on foot.  That included a swing by the still active oil well in the park (dates back to 1952!), a trip to the lake shore, some time watching the prairie dogs (supposedly one of the eastern most prairie dog colonies),

 scaring up about a million grasshoppers while walking the trails, checking out the disc golf course (overflowing with local college kids in the midst of a tournament on Saturday morning), being eyed cautiously by a very large and noisy hawk, and finding seven geocaches in the park. We did not know until logging after we returned home that we had hit 1200 caches with our last cache on Saturday and were part of a world wide 10-10-10 celebration of geocaching by finding a cache on Sunday, October 10. Of course, the best part of the weekend was probably the weather.  It was a bit warm during the day (high in the mid to high 80's), but lows at night in the mid to high 50's. 

By Sunday morning the park was rapidly becoming deserted.  We had an early lunch and then hit the road about noon.  We made it home by 2:30, including stopping to fill up with gas and transferring everything from Silver to the car for the trip home.  Two nights camping: $30, including the $10 discount and our prepaid annual State Park Pass; refilling Silver's gas tank: $100; a weekend away to a slower pace and some outdoor time: priceless.