Memorial Weekend 2015

Severe Thunderstorms is the best word to describe memorial weekend. So severe that while camping our phones regularly gave us warning alerts for tornado watches/warnings, and flash flood watches and warnings. But before our camping excursion Colby and I made a quick stop at Hamilton Pool. It's about 40 minutes away from Austin and was stunning, even if it was raining lightly. You were not allowed to swim in it (even though you have been able to in the past), but I'm glad we went.

Can you find Colby? 

Back to our camping trip. Our tent is 4 years old and held up pretty well in the hard rain! But the water underneath our slim sleeping pads was enough that I didn't want to sleep in the tent. We slept in my sisters car. Although the seats could be laid back it was one of the worst night's of my life. I think next time I'm just going to toughen up and sleep in the tent! That was the first and last time I will sleep in a car. It was terrible. I hardly slept. And it was raining bad enough that we didn't want to drive home in it so we stayed.

I wish the pictures could really show you how bad the rain was hahaha it got worse as it got dark. 

Besides us having to sleep in the tent it rained all day. We moved our fire pit under our tarp and sitting area, so we could avoid the rain a bit, but since everything was wet the fire was very smoky! So we took the logs off and just used charcoal to cook our food, which was delicious! We had tin-foil dinners and dutch-oven peach cobbler for dessert. Since it was raining we didn't get to walk around much. We played card games, listened to music and played 20 questions and watched a movie in the car because we didn't want to be outside in the rain anymore.

The next morning it had finally stopped raining, but everything was drenched. However, the sun finally came out. We laid everything out to dry and then we took a drive to assess the damage. We drove down to the shore and found it mostly abandoned from people leaving the night before. We even  found some camps that didn't care about packing up and just left their camp as is because they didn't want to pack it up in the hard rain, so they just left everything. We saw lots of tents and canopies destroyed and mangled. Then we drove to a boat ramp that we had been to the day before to see how much the water rose. The water rose about 5 feet in one night!! There was also a destroyed and beached floating dock.

That boat dock is not supposed to be there...it wasn't there the day before!!

Then, last but not least, when we were leaving Austin on memorial day we had to pull over a few times because the storms were so bad you couldn't see anything and we had to drive through areas that had tornado warnings. I'm glad we got out when we did because the flooding only got worse and I did not want to be stuck there!

On Sunday we took a quick walk through a park that was filled with peacocks! 

In all we made some great memories! But I still wanted to have a better camping experience and actually sleep in our tent. So the next day after we got home I surprised Colby and after work we had Family Home Evening camp out style in the living room!