Mammoth Takes Mother, Day 2

10 May

First real day of trip, by which I mean we ventured off the normal and boring route to head to a campground we'd never visited. We left a little late on account of the cookie disaster--I'd made chocolate chip cookies on Monday, but I seemed to have substituted baking power fro the baking soda and so they turned out hard as a rock and horribly flavored. Basically inedible.

When I discovered the disaster the night before, I determined that we would seek out a bakery in the Conroe area and buy Ed a pie to make up for the rock cookies, but Pam immediately volunteered all the ingredients for me to make a batch of replacements. Since we weren't in a hurry and the stuff was all there, I agreed. And so it went.

 About an hour-and-a-half later, cookies were complete and they were loading up Mother, her tiny suitcase in the motorhome and not so tiny wheelchair in the Jeep. We left at about ten till eleven, not bad at all.

The drive ended up a little bit on the boring side...no, I misspoke. It ended up being boring as hell. We went down through McAlester and then took the Indian Nation Turnpike over to Hugo and the campground. It was called Sander's Cove on Pat Mawse lake and it seemed pretty nice. We were in Loop B, with a view of the water but not water front The sites there were pretty close together and not especially lovely, but still, as I said, pretty nice.

There was the usual mess of trash down by the day use area. I was pleasantly surprised at how clean the Georgetown COE park was, but I guess it was an aberration. This one was as junky as usual--but only down by the water. The campground was nicely clean.

It rained almost as soon as we arrived, and when I went out to take Molly for a walk, it rained hard enough I didn't want to take my binoculars and take a chance on getting them wet. So we walked in the rain, me with raincoat on over my shorts and hood over my head and face.

There were a couple of well-marked hiking trails over on the way to Loop A. By the way, the bathroom over in Loop A was the most pristinely well-built, spacious, clean and lovely bathroom I've ever seen in ANY park, let alone a COE park.  It would be a nice bathroom in a restaurant, let alone a park out in the middle of nowhere near the Oklahoma border.

Without a map, I had no idea where the trails went or how long they were, so I didn't venture off the road. The place doesn't appear to be a great place for bird watching, although I did hear a summer tanager and a warbler that might have been a pine warbler.

Normally we wouldn't stop at a place like this, so close to home. So odds are I won't be back for more bird watching. And that's it for the day. Not as bad as I feared, but not at all good.