Weekend at Garner State Park in Texas: Kayaking the Frio River + hiking up Old Baldy!

That was awesome. Super cool. It's just stunning. I'm obsessed with this part of Texas. It's just perfect. Yesterday we left Austin to go on a little outdoor adventure to Garner State Park, which is a state park we've always wanted to visit. The park is located about three hours southwest of Austin along the Frio River and it's one of the most loved state parks in the state and is especially popular in the summer for tubing on the river. Due to COVID, they are limiting how many people are in the park, so you have to make a reservation in advance to visit, either for a day pass or to camp. It costs $8 per person per day to visit or is free if you have the Texas State Park Pass, which is $70 a year to access all state parks. We booked a campsite for the weekend, we packed some delicious food to make, and we're going to try to explore as much of the park as we can. First up, we're going kayaking. All right, you guys, meet our brand new outdoor adventure mobile, an inflatable kayak. There's tons of water all around the central Texas area, lakes, rivers. We figure since we'll be here a while, we might as well take full advantage of everything outdoors either is to do here, so we bought this bad boy. It's an Intex, which I believe is the Air Mattress brand. I'm pretty sure we had an Intex Air Mattress when we lived in Seattle. Challenger K2. We got it on Amazon on sale for $120. I think it's normally $200 something. Had great reviews. We figure if it breaks after three tries, we got our money's worth, but we're going to hope this thing lasts forever. We are just so pumped. We just, we're so pumped about this kayak. All right, we're ready for our maiden voyage. Let's go. Oh no, I'm stuck. This is cool. Look how clear that water is. Oh my goodness. This is so fun. The water is so clear. The sun's finally peeking over this hill here. So it's just, you can see straight down to the bottom and it's just, the kayak is really comfortable too. It's just perfect. So as we mentioned, Garner State Park is on the Frio River or the Rio Frio, and the river is about 200 miles long, but only about three miles of it goes through the park. And as the name implies, the river is muy frio. It is ice cold. When we got into the kayak earlier, we had to get about shin deep or so into the river, and brr, I mean, it's January, but it's pretty nice, pretty nice Texas day. It's probably like 60 something out and really sunny, but it was still very, very cold. We hear this place is popping off in the summer. It's a very popular place, but we're here in January in the winter. Not a lot of people here. I mean, where we put the kayak in the main area by the boathouse, there's a few people, but once you get away from there, there's no one. We have this whole river to ourselves basically, and we just keep saying it is gorgeous. So relaxing out here. I think we're just gonna like just put our feet back and kick back and relax. It's just perfect. We made it out alive. Oh, dang it. Our other new outdoor friend we got over the last couple weeks is this big boy. Oh, super heavy. So this is a Dutch oven. I think it's 10, yeah, there's a 10 inch right there. So this thing is super versatile because you can do stews, soups, all kinds of stuff in there. But what we're really excited about, especially for today, is you can bake in it. So you can put all your ingredients in here, cover it up, and then set it in the fire or above the fire, put some coals on top, and it'll bake it like a little oven. Since we don't have an oven in the van, now I've got an oven outside. And tonight for dinner, we're making chili and Dutch oven cornbread. That thing's really heavy. For our cornbread, we're doing a traditional style cornbread, nothing crazy added into it, but it will be gluten-free and vegan because I can't have gluten or eggs. We've made this recipe a couple of times at my parents' house though, and it's really, really good. It has awesome flavor. And we'll put a link to the recipe in the description in case you have sad dietary restrictions like I do and you can't have regular cornbread. But to make life easier, we basically just pre-measure everything before we came and we're just gonna toss it in. We should butter this. Think so? It's too late now. We just realized we didn't butter the pan or oil the pan. So this is probably gonna turn out like our campfire pizza we did in Montana. Oh my god. Whoops. I don't know. We'll see what happens. Now that our cornbread is starting to cook, it's time to get started on the chili. Okay, so I'm just gonna get this out of the way at the beginning. Like we said, we're making chili and it's a big controversy in Texas, and if you put beans in your chili, it's not Texas-style chili. So we're putting beans in it. So it just is what it is. We wanted beans in it, so that's what we're doing. But I found a recipe. Kind of going by it. I'm really just winging it. This is my secret blend of herbs and spices for my chili. So it's gonna be good. Classic chili recipe. I think that's what it was called. The one I found online, this classic chili recipe. It's really good. We blended up the onion and two jalapenos and I left all the seeds in them. Whoops. It's kind of pretty spicy. Oh yeah, that is so good. The sun's going down, so it's getting a lot cooler out. This is the perfect dinner to have while camping. My lips are starting to burn a little bit. I feel like I just need to like eat. I just need to like spoon feed myself sour cream. It is pretty spicy, but it's like probably the perfect level of spice. We knew the chili was gonna be pretty good. The real question is the cornbread. I don't know. Hopefully we don't have a pizza disaster again. Okay, it's not too hot there. We aren't sure what the weird spots are. Yeah, we don't know how that happened. It looks pretty rough around the edges. It's pretty burnt. Oh, it's kind of coming away like... Oh no, this actually might turn out pretty good. It's like trying to cut out a slice here. See, nothing's coming. Not much is coming off. Cut out a little pizza slice. Uh-oh, it's already turning bad. Oh no. Okay, well here's the top half. Okay, it's sticking together to the bottom because it's stuck to the bottom. It's so blue. Yeah, now look at this. Oh no. We managed to get two pretty good looking pieces out of the dutch oven. If you can just look past how burnt it is. It actually looks pretty solid. So we put butter on it. We let the butter melt in the dutch oven on top of the entire cornbread cake. And then my favorite way to have cornbread is with honey on top with butter. It's so good. It just makes it taste like a dessert. You could put it in the chili, but I just... I love having this like cakey, honey, sweet cornbread dessert with my dinner. I'm just gonna not take the burnt part off the bun. It kind of has the perfect texture. It's still moist. It's not too dry inside. It's kind of crumbly, but it's still holding together a little bit. You can taste a little bit of the burntness even if you don't get the bottom. But with the honey and the butter definitely makes it taste better. I'd say I'd give this a six out of... A five out of ten. It tastes good. It just looks kind of rough. The burnt parts aren't all bad. It gives it kind of a smoky flavor. We'll go with that. I can't stop laughing like the skeletons on the burnt cornbread. We should play a prank on somebody around here and tell them it's an Oreo crust. So lesson learned. I think it cooked way too hot, way too fast. The problem wasn't the sticking. It was just burnt. So maybe if we elevate it a little bit, maybe it'll cook a little better. We're gonna enjoy our nice, warm, toasty fire here. It's raging right now. Wait for all the stars to pop out because the night sky out here is incredible. And we're gonna play a fun new game we got called Cori Coral, which one of our Instagram followers Michelle sent us. And her brother actually made the game, which is crazy. We played last night and had a lot of fun and I let Adam win. So tonight I'm actually gonna win for real. But we're gonna be continuing our adventures here at Garner tomorrow with a sunrise hike. All right, this morning we're up bright and early to do a hike up Old Baldy for sunrise. It's the most popular hike in the park. It takes about half a mile to get to the top. But it looks pretty steep. We see about four sets of glowing eyes staring at us right now. So we're not alone up here. But I think it's just deer, so totally harmless. But it was kind of scary at first. We've got ourselves a pretty nice sunrise on our hands here. I think we picked a good morning to do it. Oh wow. This view is absolutely nuts. This is probably the most mountainous I've ever seen the hill country look. If you didn't tell me we were in Texas and we've lived here for a very long time, I would think we're somewhere a lot more mountainous. This is gorgeous. Wow. Yeah, it looks a lot like the Blue Ridge Mountains light. Yeah. You know, like the mini version of it. They're not as tall or as many of them. But I don't know, you get that little haze, that kind of little gray, bluish layering. It's a really nice sunrise. One of the better ones we've had in a long time. Oh yeah. Besides Guadalupe Mountains and Big Bend National Parks here in Texas, this is by far the best hike we've ever done in Texas. The views at the top are just mind-blowingly beautiful. There's so much to look at. There's the river. There are the hills. They look like mountains. There's just all the way around. It's just stunning. I'm obsessed with this part of Texas. We've never been here and we're coming back for sure. Trail's pretty short too. It took us maybe 20-25 minutes to get up here. It's pretty steep and pretty rocky. But once you get up here, the views are totally worth it. It's awesome. It's like such a short hike for such an epic payoff at the end. There are tons of trails in the park that kind of all like zigzag and loop all around here. But there are a couple different caves that we see on the map. So we're gonna go try to find those and check them out. Oh cool. We found the cave. Oh my gosh. Oh wow. You ready to go spelunking? I'm going in. Are you going in? Yeah. Here we go. Into the cave. Oh whoa. Oh. Do you want to go down? As I always say, I'm not a big cave person. But we're gonna change that. Here we go. Oh my gosh. Oh it's warm down here. Oh my goodness. Cool. I can stand up in here. This is nuts. This is pretty cool. It's just like a big room under the ground. That's what a cave is. There's a column right here. This is insane. This cave is huge. You can, well maybe not right here. But in most spots you can actually stand up and your head doesn't hit. It's just this massive empty room. I wasn't expecting it to be this cool. That was awesome. Crystal cave down. Now it's on to white rock cave. This is a much smaller one. Oh yeah. It's still pretty big. You just don't have to go down as far to get into it. I'm going in. It's not gonna explore itself. You don't need your headlamp for this one. Yeah you can't stand up in this one. Welcome to our tiny house. Cool. This park just has a little bit of everything. There's so much to see and do here. There are those epic hill country views. A crystal clear river to float kayak on. There are caves. And they have a mini golf putt-putt course to putt on. They have a grill. And in the summer they have these things called jukebox dances. Which I don't really know for sure what that is. But it sounds like a real hoedown. Unfortunately it is time for us to head back to Austin. But we are really kicking ourselves for taking so long to get out here. Because Garner State Park is just incredible. This place has so much hype. It's said to be like the best state park in Texas. Or one of the best. And it exceeded all of our expectations. It is just so gorgeous here. And it got us even more pumped to explore more of our backyard here in Texas. Which thankfully it's a very large state. So our backyard is very big. And we cannot wait to share more Texas adventures with y'all soon. They call me the master chef. The master chef. You scared me. I was going for the cheek. So that looked awkward. You didn't have it on camera? No. I was trying to light the charcoal bag. And I guess some air pressure got caught in there. As the fire was trying to start. And then the fire got caught. And then the air whooshed out. Right at me. It scared me so bad. Like blacked out. I didn't know what happened. Oh man. I've used these before. It's been forever. But I don't remember them ever doing that. So sorry. It's okay. I'm alive.