Alex's Birthday and Father's Day

Alex's Birthday is usually near Father's day, and this year they were just two days apart.

This Alex turned 12 years old, and he was ecstatic for his birthday. For about two weeks prior he would not let us forget his birthday was coming up. And when the day finally came he was so hyped the whole day.

We started the day with cinnamon rolls and presents. After the delicious cinnamon rolls, he opened his presents to see The fourth illustrated Harry Potter book, a Harry Potter cookbook, Harry Potter Perler bead patterns, the starter set for dungeons and dragons, and to his surprise a Fish! He was told later that day he would go to the pet store and pick out a Betta Fish. He has been asking for a fish for quite some time, so his wish was finally granted.

Preparing the tank

Welcome to the family Darvil!

After setting up the fish tank we all enjoyed some HEB cake. It was delicious.

For Father's day, we got him cupcakes and a hilarious photo of Carson looking royal.

Here it is in all it's glory

Earlier that week my Dad and I biked the San Antonio Mission Trail and visited many historical sites. The pictures tell the story.

Ready to start1

Odd artistic structure

Ancient Aqueduct

Salmon Ladder

Train!

Mission Chapel

Empty mission

One mission

Two missions

Three missions

Dad and his pecans

And yet again COVID is spiking. Here is San Antonio we've been getting an average of 350 cases a day. And Texas, over 3,750, Because of a premature reopening, and a complete disregard of health. We are running into a similar situation. This isn't a second wave, but just another jump on the first one. Be smarter than your government and stay home.

Garner State Park

In this hot Texan season of Summer, we made our way up to Garner State Park.

Garner is one of our favorite places to go because it is centered around the Frio River, which is a very clear river. Despite it being two hours away, we love to drive up, just so we can tube, swim, and dive all day long.

We started our fun with setting up at the base of the river, then after everything was set, we inflated our tubes and trekked for a bit upstream. After finding a good launch point we jumped in our tubes and started floatin'. Despite the walk up lasting about 10 minutes, we managed to stay on the river for about an hour-and-a-half. 

Little rapids!

All together!

Funny tube we saw

We swam our way to our canopy and got ready for lunch, we grilled up some burgers. They were definitely successful. 

That's a big burger

After lunch, we swam around a little bit, explored the dam nearby, and skipped some rocks, and we were pretty tired so we headed home.

That's not the only adventure we had this week, because this week I also rode my bike a fair amount.

Nearby is a 16-mile trail named the Salado Creek Greenway trail, and my Dad and I have wanted to do it for a very long time, so we got up early and successfully rode a 26-mile bike path. We were of course exhausted.

Here's what we did

Since we've been trying to beat the sun and ride early before the heat comes.

Log deer

Flood slowing sculpture we managed to get on top of.

Also this week I finally put together a piano-trombone duet with myself I've been practicing for some time. Here it is if you want to listen to it. Largo.Mp4

And that does it for this week. Next week I'll be back with a post on Alex's Birthday.

Guadalupe Tubing 2.0

We decided to go to Guadalupe State Park a second time this week, and it was pretty fun until things took an unexpected turn.

The introduction to this post sounds like foreshadowing for a Stephen King novel, but things weren't that bad. On Friday we arrived at Guadalupe with the whole family to tube once again. The nights before we had some really bad thunderstorms, so the river was higher than normal. We set up camp next to the riverbed and ate before we walked upstream to find a good place to launch. The tube down the river took about 15 minutes and we were heading back to our canopy when we noticed our stuff was partially submerged. Luckily some of the "river neighbors" moved our stuff on our chairs before they floated away. Our family, and pretty much all the families moved their camps further back from the river. As we were packing up the river was flooding higher and higher. We stayed in the water looking at frogs and spiders until we saw massive trees being carried down the quickly moving river. So that was a fun experience.

Before

After. The girl on the right is a friend Alex made while we were there.

Frog!

That was a big spider

Now about the storms before the flooding, they were pretty intense storms, and I got some pictures of them.

That storm hit us hard

Yet another frog!

Since then I've gotten a haircut because my Mom hated how my hair looked. 

We got this new game sling puck. It's a new competitive sport in the family. We'll see if it tears our family apart.