Nomadic Pikes

Hello All Its been a bit since I have posted anything on here.  It's because we haven't been doing too many exciting things!  Our main focus has been hiding from the cold weather.  We have been pretty successful so far (fingers crossed it continues).  We have until the middle of March here in Texas before we head back home for a few weeks (spending time between KS and MO).  We are hoping all the crazy winter weather is gone by then. So what have we been up to and where have we been??  We have been in Southern Texas.  We have been about an hour to an hour and a half from San Antonio and Corpus Christi, in a small oil town.  Derek has been working for a oil pipeline company as a Gate Guard, which means he was working 10-12 hours a day.  So the kids and I got to hang out around the camper and the camp ground all day.  We got very lucky to find a great camp ground where we have met some really good people!  The camp ground Owners are...

November 2018 Conroe Tx was our first stop, that we spent an extended amount of time at, that was not out in the middle of nowhere!  We were about an hour from Downtown Houston.  We ventured into Houston a couple of times to enjoy some of the more common attractions, but spent most of 2 weeks at the campgound hanging out and meeting some new friends!

November 2018 Here is the first time we have had any winter weather.  It was below freezing a couple of nights and rained most of the time we were there.  So we were able to enjoy some family game night fun!

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.

Our first National Park!!! We stayed at a campground in Townsend, TN, called Smoker Holler RV Resort.  It was short and sweet- full hook up site, no bath house or laundry, this was perfectly fine for us!  It was in a perfect location for us to be able to get into the park each day without costing us an arm and a leg!!  (it is not uncommon for some of the campgrounds to charge $70+ a night for a spot!) We basically drove every road that you could in the National Park.  Our favorites were the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail, Little River Road, and Laurel Creek Road.  To us they were the most beautiful areas.  Most of each of them you had water on one side or the other of the car.  Lots of people say that Cades Cove drive is great and that you must do it- we were not big fans! The entire loop is a one way, single lane road with some historic homesteads and other things along the way.  There were so many people that it took over an hour to do the ...

Our first stop in our winter travels, has brought us to Bridgeport TX.  It is located about an hour and a half outside of Dallas. We are staying our Bay Landing Thousand Trails.  This park is very nice and roomy!  (I guess it holds true to the everything is bigger in Texas thing.)  We all have been fighting our allergies from the field burning that was happening in Kansas before we left, which has turned into a cold, so we have not been too adventurous.  Lucky for us our camp ground had some exciting Halloween activites planned. Cooper won 3rd place for his pumpkin design, and 1st Place for his Robot Costume!  I did the cutting of his pumpkin, he just told me what to do, and Derek make the Robot costume-- As you all can imagine I only had to hear about Derek doing better in the competitions for several days!!