Category: life events

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

We were taking Meg up to Truman State for a 3-week “nerd camp” this weekend and drop-off was at 1:00 pm, so we figured we’d try to knock another state park off the list! Thousand Hills State Park was one of our old stomping grounds back in college when we went to Truman and we already had a handle on what there was to see there, so we decided a picnic lunch would suffice, given the amount of time we had available for the stop.

The main “claim to fame” for us was always the 573-acre lake, which is relatively large for a state park in Missouri. It was created in the 1950s and has served to provide boating and fishing opportunities for decades now. Its proximity to Kirksville, MO also makes it pretty accessible, if you want to go boating yet also want the access to groceries, restaurants, etc.

The thing I used to do, though, was hike and mountain bike around the lake. I don’t think I ever made it all the way around the lake, but I know people who did. It’s a 17 mile hike to get all the way around it, and depending on the time of year you go, you’re going to run into brush and over-growth along the way.

The mountain bike trails, however, I definitely took advantage of back in college. When we drove through this time, we noticed that they’d really expanded a paved trail since we were last there, so they’ve made more cycling accessible to those that don’t really want to go down any bike trails.

They’ve also got a full marina and restaurant, the latter of which was considered relatively “fancy” back in our college days. When we were there, we didn’t see a ton of boats out, but there were definitely a few out enjoying the shockingly good early-July weather (seriously, it was in the low-70s. What?!).

To top it off, there were solar telescopes set up at the site we picked to eat lunch! They had 3 of them set up with different filters so allow you to look at the sun in different modes. We didn’t ask too many questions, as we were kind of on a schedule, but one of them showed the sun as it “normally” looks (i.e. yellow-orange), whereas another was set up to make it look “black and white,” so increased contrast. It was some pretty neat equipment they had set up for folks who were stopping by!

We didn’t view the campgrounds at all, though we did drive past a series of cabins that are available, overlooking the lake. Perhaps sometime, we’ll camp there, but for now, we spent enough time to knock it off the list!

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

Okay, so hear me out… Technically, we mostly visited Missouri Mines State Historic Site, which is not a State Park. However, we did hike into St. Joe State Park while we were there, and both sites are adjacent to one another, so it’s getting counted. Sue me.

The historic site is actually rather interesting! Apparently, Missouri was the biggest exporter of lead in the world for decades, and that area has a history with lead mining that goes back to the 1700s. After the Civil War, the St. Joseph Lead Company purchased the land and started the mine until the mine started to decline in output by the 1970s, when the company donated the land back to the State for use as a State Park. The buildings were left in disrepair for years until there was enough money budgeted to start the historic site.

So, the 8000+ acres around it became St. Joe State Park, whereas the 25 acre space that housed the mine and the mill itself became the Missouri Mines State Historic Site.

It’s clear that the historic site is very much a “work in progress.” They’ve got some artifacts and some dioramas on display, but you can’t really go down into the mine itself, for example, or walk through most of the buildings. I think that’s the ultimate goal, but many of the buildings are in such disrepair that safety is something of an issue.

It seemed decently well-attended around there (for reasons I’ll get to in a bit), so there were families walking around checking out what there was to see. Again, there were a mix of models and displays, but some of the more interesting aspects of it was the information about geology that was somewhat unique to this site, in comparison to other State Parks we’ve attended.

There weren’t a lot of interactive things to do, though, so for younger kids, there were some neat displays, but there was still a lot of reading. Other State Parks have an obvious “kids area” that have bugs, taxidermy specimens, or fish in water tanks. This place has….rocks….

…but some of those rocks looks really cool under UV light!

Again, there were a decent amount of people there, but part of that was connected to the market outside. They must do this most Saturdays, but it had something of a “Farmer’s Market” vibe, selling shirts, big rocks, and other crafts. One gentleman was selling geodes, so the kids got to pick one each and then he cracked it open in front of them. Pretty cool!

After that, we “hiked” on the paved trail that went into St. Joe State Park. We only went out for about 0.8 mi, total, so it barely qualifies, but again, technically we were hiking in the State Park, so I’m counting it.

The paved trail heads further into St. Joe State Park, and it’s mostly intended for cycling. It crosses a lot of ATV courses, which is apparently the “claim to fame” for the Park.

I didn’t take a ton of pictures, but you can imagine the scene. There’s a lake if you want to go boating; there’s a beach if you want to go swimming; and there’s a lot of dirt/sand if you want to ride your dirt bike or your four-wheeler. There were tons of Jeeps and other trucks with trailers in the parking lot.

Honestly, for that purpose, this Park is pretty cool! We don’t have that kind of equipment, but if we did, I suspect it’s a place we’d check out more thoroughly. However, kind of like St. Francois State Park, there were just a lot of people there, likely coming down from St. Louis or coming up from Ste. Genevieve. I suspect this place also attracts folks from southern Illinois, too. So, again, like, St. Francois, go into St. Joe State Park expecting to see tons of people, because they’re going to be unavoidable!

We drove through the campgrounds and looked at other facilities, but the lake and off-road vehicle area seems to be the big draw. I guess when I’m ready to take the Outback out to find some sand dunes, I know where to look!

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

So yeah, we have actually been to St. Francois State Park before. Now, at the time, it was April 2013, so Meg was there, and technically so was Calvin! Still, we were in the area of Farmington, MO and figured we could stop in and count Calvin as having visited while outside of a uterus.

We had already gone to Hawn State Park and were heading to St. Joe State Park, so it seemed like a good opportunity to stop at a grocery store and pick up some lunch stuff. Then, we could eat there and check out one of the features of St. Francois that we didn’t take advantage of 10 years ago.

St. Francois is relatively large and also has hiking trails and plenty of shaded picnic tables, so it’s an ideal place for a stop. We didn’t look at the camp facilities this time, since we actually stayed there once.

Instead, we checked out the aptly named Big River, which was just down from the picnic area. We didn’t take our swimming stuff along, and frankly, there were a ton of people down there with rafts and inner tubes, some just floating by and others just hanging out on the sandbar.

Of course, the last time we were there, it was April and Meg was all bundled up in a coat, so we wouldn’t have gone to check out this river at the time. This time, though, would have been an ideal time to spend the afternoon playing in the water and taking in the sun!

However, like I said, it was pretty crowded with a lot of people, and many of them were very, very loud… There was even a birthday party complete with balloons and table cloths. So yeah, like many rivers in Missouri, they tend to attract plenty of locals looking for outdoor entertainment, so if you’re going to check out a place like this, know what you’re getting into. It won’t be a “private beach experience:” far from it!

Anyway, again, this is more of an “update” than another visit, so it still goes on the list as #2! I think this is the only one on the list that didn’t “fully” include Calvin, so we probably won’t have to post any more updates, but we’ll see!

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

Our schedule this Summer is quite full, but in the interest of eventually visiting all the State Parks in Missouri, we spent the weekend in Farmington, which happens to be located near a few different sites. One such location is Hawn State Park, which I’m pretty sure I’ve been to, but it would have been back in my Boy Scout days, as they have a pretty good group site. I don’t remember it being a park we visited often, because it isn’t particularly close to Columbia, but I definitely remember other Scouts in other troops talking about going there frequently.

If you look on the map, you’ll see there really isn’t a ton to do there, unless you like hiking and fishing. We were making our stop mostly as a way to check it off the list, so the plan wasn’t to stay all day or anything, so we picked a hiking trail that was maybe a mile or two long. We went along the Pickle Creek Trail, named because it follows the eponymous body of water. It’s actually a relatively long loop trail, so we went about as far as a fork and turned around.

We ended up going 1.8 mi, out and back, and while it wasn’t particularly strenuous, it was definitely pretty rocky and still involved some climbing over large-ish boulders (not quite Elephant Rocks-style, though). There’s actually a 10 mile stretch of trails in the park that’s available for backpacking, so if that’s what you’re after, it may be one of the better locations in Missouri that isn’t on the Ozark Trail system (at least, so far as I can tell).

The camp sites we saw seemed fine, though somewhat limited. There were people staying, including a decent number of folks in tents rather than campers. We were there in mid-June, and though it was a hot June for us this year, it wasn’t too bad that weekend. Honestly, I think the kids would have gotten relatively bored had we actually stayed there, so it was good to visit and not spend the entire weekend there. If they were more into fishing and hiking, that would be a different matter, obviously.

I can certainly see the appeal, though. It isn’t that far from St. Louis, and if you want to hit a 10 mile hiking trail, it’s a good option that’s close to a lot of services. You can also stay in Farmington, like we did, and head in for the day to get a good hike in and dip your toes in the water.

Last, but not least, this is the first weekend Meg had a phone. She used it to take ridiculous pictures. Like her father before her. 🙂

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

Part of the benefit of this little “exercise,” highlighting state parks we’ve visited with the kids, is that there’s always one I’ve somehow missed that I should have mentioned before, and it turns out, Bennett Spring State Park is another such example. Thankfully, we didn’t visit this park that long ago, but it was still mid-August 2022, as we were heading on a float trip with the kids for the first time (which I also never blogged about. Oops.). As part of the trip, we hit Bennett Spring on the way down to go floating on the Niangua River and stay in a cabin for the night, which was a nice little getaway before school started.

Regardless, Bennett Spring State Park has a few things going on, but it’s primary “claim to fame” is the start of trout fishing each year. This year, over 1600 people showed up the weekend of March 1st to go fishing, so it ends up being a pretty big draw for that crowd.

Thankfully, those of us that don’t do much trout fishing still had a few other things to see. Bear in mind that we were heading down to go “glamping” in a cabin (with A/C, no less…because it was mid-August in Missouri…), so we didn’t have a ton of time to explore everything the park had to offer, but we did get to check out the interpretive center they had.

Honestly, we were pretty impressed by the extent of the exhibits! I don’t know if it was a combination of funding for making a destination for semi-local schools, or if it was an excuse to entertain kids while their parents went fishing, but there were tables set up in an open space for instructors to talk to kids about local flora and fauna; there were displays talking about springs across the Ozarks (pictured above, obvi), and a lot of cool models of animals and insects endemic to the region.

We ended up killing a remarkable amount of time checking out all of the exhibits in the area, especially the large insect models that Calvin was quite interested in. He’d already heard/read about some of the species we could find in the park, but seeing them enlarged to 1000x was pretty cool for him. Meg and Brooke mostly read through some of the signs, but still got a lot out of the nature center.

Again, we didn’t actually camp at the park, but there are quite a few options available, including tent camping, group sites, and cabins. A substantial amount of the focus is on fishing, so we suspect this park gets especially busy during the trout season, perhaps making it a little less “isolated” than some of the other state parks, depending on what your desire is. I could see it being more “busy” than we’d really want to deal with, but then again, you can’t argue with the fishing opportunities if that’s your thing.

There are a few hiking trails along the State Park, most of which are less than a mile long. They do have a 7.5 mi Natural Bridge trail that runs in a loop through the park, but after the drive down there, we weren’t going to get the kids to go along on that kind of thing. It didn’t seem all that hilly in the area, so I suspect the trails aren’t too bad for most people, but in mid-August in Missouri, the bugs and spiderwebs weren’t particularly fun, so I’d recommend hitting those earlier in the year than when we attended.

Bennett Spring seems alright, but it clearly has a focus on fishing! Maybe when the kids are more grown up and I decide to get into trout fishing, we’ll go back and check it out further. For what it was, it seemed pretty good!

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

Hello! I am Meg Linsenbardt, and today I will be reviewing Lewis and Clark State Park! Enjoy!

We started off with a hike. It was brief, and was only 1.6 miles. If was sort of like a loop, so lots of variety in scenery. There were not very many trees, so you could see the entire path all the way throughout it. It was also nice and flat.

Then, we got to the main attraction…… The interpretive area! It is a nice big platform overlooking an oxbow lake, with a compass rose on the ground and lots of names of people who were on the Lewis and Clark expedition, and are now dead (I hope). There is a big compass rose in the middle, so people always will know what direction they are facing. When we stopped here, we did lots of interpretive dancing (true story) and moved on.

Although it is a lake, it was almost all the way dried up! There was not much to look at, except for the sign pictured, explaining oxbow lakes. So, we quickly looked at the lake and went back to the interpretive area.

We saw trees that were destroyed by beavers, but the beavers were not there because the lake was all dried up.

Overall, there is a lot of work to do at this park. There is definitely need for some rocks, or at least grass in certain areas. It looks like nobody has done any landscaping work here for a long while.

All in all, it was a pretty good trip. It was fun to do lots of interpretive dance, and the whole family got their steps in. We also knocked another state park off the list. We only have one more to go in the northwest section of Missouri! That is really exciting.

See you next time,

Meg Linsenbardt

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

I gotta be honest, I thought I posted about this two years ago, but apparently I didn’t. On July 17, 2021, we took a float trip around a “duck’s head” bend in the Platte River using our inflatable kayaks. It turned out to not be a great call, because Brooke and I punctured the bottom of ours a mile in (the sides kept us afloat!), whereas the kids’ kayak kept going pretty well. We weren’t on the river all that long, so it was a pretty lazy float.

Buuuut, while we were north of Kansas City, we opted to check out a local state park while we were there. Weston Bend State Park is maybe 15 minutes from where we were floating, and there was a bike trail following along the Missouri River, so Calvin and I took our bikes along and Brooke and Meg walked along the paved trail.

The park itself didn’t appear to have much going on, but had a solid campground and some trails. We didn’t look at the tobacco barns, though we drove past them. Frankly, it seemed like a pretty chill state park without a lot going on.

Still, the trails connect up to Weston, MO, which has antique stores, restaurants, and more, so it’s nice to have a campground connected to nearby entertainment, even though much of that “entertainment” is probably aimed at older folks and not at children. We had a good time biking, though the most exciting part of the trip was when Meg almost stepped on a snake. It sure looked like a copperhead, and thankfully before Meg could step on it, the snake kept on moving and nothing more “exciting” happened…

Considering it took 2 hours to get there, I don’t expect we’ll be visiting Weston Bend anytime soon again. Not a bad place, but didn’t really have much to do that we were interested in.