Day Trip to Clear Lake
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July 4, 2006:
We'll first start with the programming part of this entry. Last Sunday I managed to spend a day of Travel, Bird Watching, Geocaching, Board Gaming, and Video Gaming, so I figure I need to edit up the site a bit to handle multiple categories. So now a blog entry can have more than one category! Of course, you people that only read the email updates won't be able to see it, since categories aren't listed on the emails.
Now, on to the story of the day:
Since I had to take my wife and in-laws to the airport early early that morning, I decided to make plans with Conan and Jennifer to go geocaching in Clear Lake. I, of course, picked a spot for geocaching that is on the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail: #84: Challenger 7 Memorial Park. I met with my partners in crime at the McDonalds by the Baybrook Mall and we headed over.
We had been worried that it was going to be raining, but luckily it wasn't. The bad part is that it was so wet that the mosquitos were quite abundant. This greatly limited our geocaching, since most geocaches required us to trudge through wooded areas, where mosquitoes like to hide. We did manage to find one geocache the entire time we at the park because it didn't require going through woods. The park itself had an elevated board walk with a cache at one of the lookout stations. At another lookout station, I introduced Conan to birding by showing and explaining the Great Egret across the water. I had just happened to bring my extra pair of binoculars
Disappointed about the mosquitoes, we started to head back to the car. We did make a quick stop at the boat docks. It had a beautiful picnic area; I would definately bring Pam back here for a picnic! While admiring the view, we saw a Northern Cardinal, a Snowy Egret, another Great Egret, and a few Roseate Spoonbills.
After the park, Jennifer was begging to do more geocaching, so I told her we could do some park-and-grabs in Clear Lake, and that's just what we did. We got caches in three different parking lots and went to eat lunch. In those parking lots, we saw a few common birds (which were new to Conan): Common Grackles, Mourning Doves, Rock Doves, and Laughing Gulls.
After lunch, we decided to go to Horizon Games and play the new game I bought: Puerto Rico. The person I bought it from was selling all his board games because he and his wife were going to teach English in Kuwait. I couldn't help but feel a little jealous! I had only played Puerto Rice once before and it over a year ago, so it took us a little while to figure it out. The general idea is this: you are the governor of San Juan, and you have to build up your city. The winner of the game wins by number of victory points, and there two ways to do this. The first way is to invoke a "captain" turn, in which you load your goods on to a ship for the old world. Every item you load gives you a victory point. The second way is by building buildings. Each building has a victory point value attached to it. The most a building costs to buy, the more victory points it's worth. In order to get money, you have to sell goods to a trader or invoke a round that hasn't been invoked in a while. Each round where a round-type card hasn't been invoked, a single dubloon gets put on it. Conan managed to win the game we were playing by a few points.
After board gaming, it started raining. That pretty much killed any chance of geocaching or birding, so we went back to Conan's place, where Conan and I played The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures for the Gamecube. Once we actually beat it, I'll write a review about it :) Since Conan is the only person that reads my video game reviews, it's hardly exciting news.
Recent News
| 2008-06-27 - | So very busy, but upcoming road trip! |
| 2008-06-11 - | Luckily, fate missed |
| 2008-06-04 - | Gas prices have got me down |
| 2008-05-28 - | May Update |
| 2008-05-07 - | Dropping hobbies like bad habits |
| 2008-05-02 - | Stuck in the middle (random thought) |
| 2008-04-28 - | On this day in Carey's life... |
| 2008-04-21 - | And so starts a new chapter in my life |
| 2008-04-01 - | Time keeps on slipping... slipping... |
| 2008-03-28 - | Blog changes |
| 2008-03-25 - | Cell Phone Woes |
| 2008-03-01 - | Texas Independence Day 5k Run |
| 2008-02-29 - | Running Pains |
| 2008-02-26 - | Law School |
| 2008-02-20 - | Busy Last Month: Travel, Health, Family, Home, and Fun |
| 2008-01-14 - | Aramco Houston Half Marathon |
| 2008-01-08 - | Road trip to Florida |
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