Last weekend we had a father-son camping trip for the middle school guys from my church. It was the first time I’ve slept in a tent in two years. We had a smaller than hoped for turn-out (11 all together), but we still had a great time.

I had hoped we could stay at Mineral Wells, but I underestimated the lead time on getting a reservation by about a month and they were booked solid. The helpful folks in Austin who take reservations by phone for all of the state parks in Texas helped me find Cedar Hill State Park. I’d been to Cedar Hill before to ride mountain bikes, but it never occurred to me to camp there.

I drove down a couple weeks ago to check out the camping. They have a rediculous number of sites there (more than four times the sites at Mineral Wells) but 90% of them are, shall we say, overly civilized. I’m talking 20 foot concrete slabs with water and electric hook-ups for your aluminum house on wheels. On my scouting trip I saw the flicker of TVs through the windows of many “fake-campers'” rigs.

Still, I was able to find a small pocket in one far corner of the park where the camp sites looked like camp sites: thick trees, shielded from the road, with just enough space to set up some tents around the fire ring. Plus these had access to a “beach” on Joe Pool Lake (and by “beach” I mean a flat, dirt area between the trees and the mud).

A quirk of the reservation system is that you can reserve a spot at a particular park for a particular date, but you can not reserve a particular spot. The actual camp site numbers are given out “first come, first serve” at the park on the day of the reservation.

I left the house at 5:30 AM to get to the gate by 6:30. I was first in line, but there was, in fact, a line by 7, when the office opened. Thus I was able to secure three of those coveted “more primitive” sites (#32, 42, and #43 if you’re interested).

When we pulled in that night, the place was absolutely packed. I couldn’t believe it. I was very lucky to get the sites I had picked out. There were kids riding bicycles on the park road all evening, the “clank” of horse shoes well into the night, and bright flood lights shining on noisy camp sites all around us. I felt very blessed to be sheltered from most of it by the trees around our sites. As stillness settled over the park that night, the only sound was the crickets, the wind in the trees, and the constant whirl of traffic on I-20 about a mile north of us.

Ah, well. It was still a great trip, even for a short, one-nighter. We all had a good time and stayed safe. Tent (on the ground), fire, hot dogs and smores… Yep. It was a camping trip alright!