I would not consider myself a Rennaissance Faire person per se, but I do enjoy the food and beverage and costuming. I was pretty intrigued when my roommate invited me to go last weekend, and with her friend who has a campsite and goes every year no less! The Sherwood Forest Faire is one of the bigger ren faires in the country, and certainly blew the last one I went to out of the water.

This, along with Wild Basin, is not a state park, but it is close-ish to Austin at about 45 - 60 minutes away. You can see here that the trail makes a triple ice cream scoop shape, which means you can walk along the outside edge of the whole thing and come out to about 3.5 miles of hiking. This is the perfect activity for the times because you get some exercise and fresh air, outside the house and not surrounded by people or touching things other people have touched.

This place was a tip from a random woman at a different hike while I was waiting in line for the bathroom. I’m glad I listened! Government Canyon is outside of San Antonio and about an hour and forty minutes from Austin. I now have a state park pass so I had no issues getting in. The first thing I noticed while looking at the trail map is how MUCH trail there is!

I didn’t have high hopes about the hiking in Guadalupe River State Park. I read online that it was mostly a place where you might swim or kayak. After looking at the trail map and seeing a 3.1 mile hike, I decided it was worth it to at least check out. This is roughly 1.5 - 2 hours driving from Austin which, for Texas, is decently close. The weather lately has been pretty dry so the river was a little low.

I’ve been going to PAX since 2014 although, historically, to PAX East in Boston. You can refer back to my Tumblr blog for those. I’ve also been to PAX prime back when my sister lived in Seattle. So this was my first time trying PAX South in San Antonio, Texas. I’ve been to San Antonio twice now but I’d never been to the convention center. I woke up around 7 to prepare my makeup but I actually ended up sticking with just eyeliner and the contacts.

While it’s technically not a state park I’m including this hike in the “20 State parks of 2020” collection because I can. The park is really close to Austin and has only 2.5 miles of hiking but does have decent overlooks of hill country. There’s also good variety in things to see when in such a short span. We crossed a decently serene creek. The waterfall doesn’t really have a good vantage point but it looks decently impressive if you squint.

Today we went about an hour and a half North West of Austin. I have a list of 20 state parks to check off and I’m rapidly running out of ones that are close by! The park website descriptions of the trails made them seem pretty bland. I’ve been keeping my expectations low on purpose and I wasn’t disappointed. The signage to get to Pecan Flats wasn’t very clear and we went the wrong way a couple of times.