Nomadic Pikes

Summer 2018 Our first 2 months of being Fulltime were spent in the beautiful location of Table Rock Lake, MO.  We were able to enjoy some much needed relaxation time with some very close family, my Grandma, Grandpa, and Dad.  This also gave us somewhat of break in period for our new life style!  We loved our lake time, I think the kids swam everyday that it was not raining. My brother, Matt, and his Husband, David, were able to come hang out with us for a weekend.  That meant it was Go Cart Time!!

June 2018 Natural Falls State Park was a quick stop over for us, but this place is so cool I want to make sure and talk about it.  The campgrounds are very neat and clean.  There are trails that go around the campgrounds for any age or activity level.  The trail to the falls was pretty easy, which was great because this was our first hike.  We were not sure how the kids would do, and they did amazing, btw!  The fall was beautiful, we beat most of the crowd so we were able to stay at the bottom for awhile and enjoy the cool temps and the view. We liked it so much that we went back again the morning before we left. If you are in Eastern OK and need a something to do this is a must!

We are finally on the road for our Grand First Trip! Our first stay was at Fort Kearney State Recreation Area. While there we visited the Fire Fighter Museum.  The kids loved it because they were able to dress up and play on a wooden fire truck!  It was a small museum, but it held a lot of information.

We stayed at Chester Frost Park.  It was a great campground.  It set on the lake with a large swim area and sandy beach to play on.  The entire park was filled with Deer, we could not take a drive anywhere without seeing them. We did our first "off the beaten path" hike.  The trail head was a break in the guard rail along a road!  Most of the hike was over large rocks that are part of the creek bottom.  We all really enjoyed this type of hike.  It was about a mile each way to the falls, but did feel like it.  Kenzie loved to be able to climb over everything.  Cooper decided that he was going to have a day of funny poses or faces in each of the pictures.

Our First Stop on our new First Trip! We stayed at Cherokee Landing Thousand Trails.  This is our first Thousand Trails campground.  So far, not impressed!  Most of the camp sites are overgrown and not usable, from the upkeep not being there.  The lake is no longer able to be swam in.  (Which, by the way, Cooper says is completely unacceptable!  If there is a lake you should be able to swim in it, in his mind)  They closed the pool for the season without posting it, a day after we got there, and it was still 90+.  But we were told by our neighbors that this is not the norm for Thousand Trails, so we will hang in there! We enjoyed our time in Memphis, though.  The Peabody Hotel Ducks, were really awesome!  So if you have never seen them, here is what it is.  The Peabody Hotel houses ducks for a few months at a time.  Each set of ducks is trained, with their ring master, to walk from their enclosure on the roof, into their...

This was our second Thousand Trails campground.  We stayed at Natchez Trace.  This campground was about the same as the one near Memphis, not so great.  It, again, had not been kept up with very well.  Worst of all, NO (and I mean none, zip, zero, zlicho) cell service!  (Now we would not have complained about this a few months ago, but now our phones are the connection that we have with everyone outside of our camper!)  So as you can imagine we are kind of regretting our membership purchase at this point!  This was prob the longest 11 days of our adventure so far. Biggest thing was that the kids earned their 2nd Jr Ranger Badges.

We loved Casper so much that we extended our stay so that we could see more. We stayed at Casper East RV Park and Campground.  This place is nothing great, its clean and good for a few nights.  There is not many trees and it is right next to train tracks (seems to be a trend with us).  The best thing is that their bath house had completely separate rooms for the showers, so that meant a locking door!!! (yes this is really something to get excited about). We spent some time on Casper Mountain.  This was cool because it was the kids first time this high up.  They were amazed.  We love to just drive and adventure down random roads to see what we will find along the way, so this was cool here. We hiked the trail to Garden Creek Falls.  This was the first waterfall that they could actually touch so they enjoyed it.