I wasn't on this hike but since my wife has been derelict in her blogging duty I felt obliged to record it here. Trees! Regan! Jean! More trees! Hamilton Pool!

For our autumn camp out this year we went to Shaffer Bend. It's an LCRA park located on the north shore of Lake Travis it was only an hour drive from home. The campsites were nice in that they were well shaded, really quiet, and big. The facilities were pretty minimal with no water or electricity at the campsite and the porta-loos being half a mile away. View of Lake Travis from our picnic table There wasn't much of a beach but the swimming was nice Some friends of ours were in town for the weekend so we were able to sneak out of camp for a while to have dinner with them There were several trails in the park but unfortunately most were heavily laden with sticker burrs. View from within the Balcones Canyonland National Wildlife Refuge

Back circa the Carter administration the two suspicious looking characters flanking us here met as graduate students at the University of Texas. Since then they moved out of state, and during the Reagan administration befriended an odd English couple who just happened to be Jean's parents. So, towards the end of the second Bush administration when Jean inquired as to where in the United States would be cool to live for a while they both answered, "Austin!" And the rest is history.  Lex and Susan were back in town for a reunion with their graduate student group. We crashed their party and plied them with board games. Word on the Street became a little heated My only hope is that no long standing friendships were severed today.

Here are some pictures from their first week. 11 of the 20 eggs hatched out. For warmth I draped a heating pad over curved section of metal fencing to form a cave. You can see the edge of it at the top of the picture. The rocks in the water are to prevent the baby quail from accidently drowning themselves.

Continuing in my quail husbandry experiment I decided it was time to hatch some quail on my own I was also having a difficult time sourcing quail locally. I ordered an egg incubator and since I processed all of my roosters several months ago I had to order some fertilized quail eggs online. The shiny new incubator The fertilized eggs arrived a day after the incubator. Ironically, there were shipped from a town less than twenty miles from where we live. Placing eggs in the incubator Ready to incubate 14 days later the first hatchling popped out