Sunday June 15
I didn’t sleep on the floor as planned. My hip and leg were horrible all day. I’m thinking it’s mainly the seated position during the drive causing the pain and it’s aggravated by the bed, but I can’t prove it.
We went over to the Firehouse Café for breakfast. It’s in Hutchinson, about 10 minutes away. Very poor coffee but very good biscuits and gravy. My eggs were ordered ‘over medium’ I think, but they were over easy--very runny. There was so much gravy that it would have been impossible to eat it all. You couldn’t even see the biscuits underneath it all. But Molly got to enjoy my doggie bag leftovers.
If I’m ever in this town again, I’ll definitely eat breakfast here. But I’ll do a half order of biscuits and gravy and then add on another biscuit plain. So I can put some jelly on it. So far as eggs go, I can make better eggs myself. But I never get biscuits at home, gravy or jelly or not.
After that I took Molly for a short walk, then tried to go jogging. We ended up on a horse trail through sand, which was horrid. I couldn’t jog in the loose sand and the horse hoof prints made the surface freakishly bumpy.
Lark sparrow
So I retired my jogging gear and went out to walk the woodlands trail. And take a picture of a Bell’s Vireo. I took a trail that went through woods and ended at picnic tables by the road, so I assumed that was it. But it was very short, so we went on down the original trail and eventually came to a marker for the Woodlands trail. We went down it for a while—it was woods, too. Nice and shady. The day was getting pretty hot by then (it was after noon) and the shade felt good.
But soon it was time to give up and go back. No Bell’s vireo showed its pesky little beak although I heard them all around me. It’s a fussy scramble of notes—fulfrfrurfleefefe dee, fulfrfrurfleyefefe duh. Sometimes skipping the dee part; sometimes the duh. The birds are very shy and hard to see, but at one point when I stood completely still for long enough, one came out in the open to look at me. (That was yesterday when I didn’t have the camera)
We should come back here any weekday or even a weekend in the off season. It’s a very nice campground. There were cuckoo, killdeer, lark sparrows, red-eyed vireo, Bell’s vireo, Mississippi Kites, field sparrows, bobwhite, indigo buntings, probable orchard orioles, turkey in the distance, and a couple of ducks in the pond.
Funny there were no meadowlarks. I thought they were everywhere.
REVIEW: Sand Hills State Park site 43 69/2=$35
More like a resort than a state park
This place was brand new and felt like a swanky resort instead of a state park. The sites are huge with concrete pads and gravel driveways. We were in a full hookup site, #43 I think, which was at the end of the circle closest to the entrance building and the dumpstation. All of the neighboring sites on our side of the loop were were stacked side-by-side like sardines—way too close. The site on the other side of us (site #1) was a decent way away, and the site across the drive from us was well spaced. That is the only negative thing I have to say about this place--the full hookup sites are too close together. But the W/E sites around the other side of the loop have nice spacing.
In addition to 50-amp FHU, we had a picnic bench, firepit, lantern pole and a large, covered charcoal grill. And a nice little shade tree behind us. There are large trees in and around the camping circle, but none close to the sites that I can see. So don’t count on shade…but then you don’t have to worry about tree branches peppering your roof in a blow, either. And no problems with satellite internet, either.
The host in the office was very, very nice. We did have to buy a day use permit in addition to our camping fee. The rule appears to be that for every motorized vehicle entering the park you have to buy a day use permit. Which means that a truck + trailer would only need one sticker but a motorhome + towing would need two. But the camp host agreed that since we’d only be driving one vehicle at a time, one sticker would suffice. Don’t count on that being true for a different camp host, however. She may have been exceeding her authority in permitting it.
All in all, a lovely place. The camping ring surrounds some little ponds with frogs and turtles. (And flies and gnats, but not many mosquitos). The trail system is extensive, with a decent map but a lot of social trails or pipeline crossings that make it confusing at times. But it’s not so large that you could get lost for long, plus, you can see a communications tower or two in the distance and occasionally hear the road noise. The little road coming into the park isn’t heavily trafficked, but it seems to be used by local drivers as a shortcut to home.
If you’re a birder, you’ll see Mississippi Kites sailing around the clearings and you’ll be enchanted to hear all the Bell’s vireos skulking in the bushes along the trails.
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