Living Between the Twin Bridges

Now that we are on the road again, we are slowly making our way towards Kansas City. We are about a week away from the due date of our first granddaughter, and we want to arrive in Kansas City at about the same time she does. As we left our remote camping spot in northeast Oklahoma, we headed down some mighty narrow roads. Not wide enough for a center stripe, our goal was to not wipe out the mailboxes beside the road. It took some mighty good driving (and nerves of steel) when Mark met a truck coming from the opposite direction.

We eventually made it to a much bigger highway. Then another hour down the road we arrived at our next destination at Twin Bridges State Park. You might notice in the picture below that we didn't put out the slides, or lower the jacks. That's because we are waiting for the phone call that our son and daughter-in-law have headed to the hospital for the birth of our first grandchild. We are ready to start up that diesel motor and make the trip to Kansas City any minute now.

We love this state park because about half of its camping sites are "first-come-first-serve." So even though people planning ahead can reserve a site at two of the campgrounds, we could still snag a great site overlooking the river in this campground on a Thursday. This is our view from the bluff overlooking Spring River. We are actually camped on a peninsula that separates the Neosho and Spring Rivers.

As you might guess from the name "Twin Bridges," the entrance to this park is between the two bridges over those two rivers.This is our view of the Spring River bridge, about a mile from our campground.

At the end of our peninsula, we can actually see the confluence of the two rivers. That's the Spring River on the left and the Neosho on the right. They continue together at this point, forming the north end of Grand Lake.

We are in decompression mode, as we get used to being back on the road. So we enjoyed low-key activities like some walks around the state park, enjoying the spring wildflowers. We have seen three-leaf trillium before, but this version had an interesting three-petal flower unlike the white blooms we have seen before.

This state park has a brand new welcome center, that had its grand opening earlier this month.

Out front are two new dogwood trees. We enjoy the wild dogwoods with their bright white blooms. But these are pink dogwoods, and they are beautiful in the spring.

This is the paddlefish capitol of the world, and we found that people from all over come here in the spring when these unusual fish are spawning up these two rivers. That sounds mighty impressive, but we had to do some research to find out what a paddlefish was. We found this picture on one of the signs by the marina. How would you like to find something like that on the end of your fishing line?

On the same sign we found all kinds of information for paddlefish snaggers. Just so you don't have to try to read all the fine print below, here are the highlights from the sign by the marina: you must possess a paddlefish permit before fishing for these strange-looking fish. The daily limit is one paddlefish, and it cannot be caught on a Monday or Friday. It takes ten years for a paddlefish to mature, and then they don't spawn every year. Many of the fish are banded for population modeling calculations. We attempt to educate ourselves and others in this blogging adventure.

The parking lot at the marina was completely full of pickups and boat trailers on the weekend. In addition to paddlefish, we heard this a great place to fish for bass and crappie.

We aren't planning to do any fishing, but we're hoping to get our kayak on the river before we leave (unless, of course, we get that phone call and we're heading to the hospital to meet our new granddaughter!)