One of my absolute favorite Texas traditions is our Texas Bluebonnets!
This year was slightly depressing though. We waited too long to go bluebonnet hunting.
It was a great rain year for Texas, so I think the bluebonnets bloomed a bit earlier than usual. Either way, we usually head to check them out sometime in early April (or even late March) and this time we didn’t go looking until the very end of April.
We were going to the Bovay Scout Ranch anyway, and usually we head down 290 towards Austin to find the bluebonnets (which is the direction we would be driving to go camping), so we held off until the weekend we were planning to camp.
I was getting more and more depressed the further we drove though! All the usual spots we see large patches were either already mowed (Texas doesn’t mow during bluebonnet season!) or covered with ordinary weeds. We saw a few Indian Paintbrushes, but no bluebonnets.
Because there was supposed to be a BIG storm in Navasota that evening, we made the decision to glamp at the Best Western for the evening. I asked the lady at the hotel if she knew of any nearby bluebonnet patches and she said she actually hadn’t seen ANY this year. Crazy.
We had fun with our glamping and woke up to even more stormy weather in the morning.
Thankfully it cleared out and we were all able to head over to Bovay Scout Ranch to begin our fun day of scouting adventures!
Lo and Behold…we saw our first bluebonnets on the scout ranch! Woohoo! Sadly…it was a less than impressive sight to see…
It was okay though, we were there to have fun with our Cub Scout pack and throughout the day we actually ended up finding a few more impressive patches.
We spent the day getting muddy…
Lassoing Steer…
Playing Golf…
Shooting BB Guns..
Canoeing…
Shooting arrows…
Wearing snakes found in nearby sheds like necklaces…
and camping with our scout family (and our real family! My nephews are part of the same pack, so scouting is a family adventure for us!).
It was a great weekend.
Our bluebonnet pics might not be very impressive, but our memories made are just perfect.
Thankfully…we did find SOME bluebonnets though. So the tradition continues!
Bluebonnet pictures 2008 – Present
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