Sam Houston Jones State Park

We spent the weekend at a state park in Lake Charles, LA called Sam Houston Jones State Park. The park is on the banks of the Calcasieu River. This park has a Frisbee golf course. We saw a group of guys playing Saturday morning. This is the first park that we've visited that has one. I think it looks pretty fun. The RV sites are very close together and some sites aren't paved, only gravel. We stayed in cabin #9 and it was small but nice. Even though the cabin can sleep 6, it is best suited for 2 people. It had a screened in porch and we ate our meals outside. I took this picture early Saturday morning when we went fishing. We didn't catch anything, but it was still fun. After fishing, we rode our bikes around the park. We saw several bat houses near the swamp's edge. Here's a picture of one:

We walked close to the bat house and we could hear them....they make lots of squeaking noises and they smelled pretty bad. The smell was from their guano (bat poop). Bats are beneficial to have around because they eat mosquitoes. There were tons of mosquitoes around the park; the bats probably thought it was an all you can eat mosquito buffet.

This was the only alligator we saw. He didn't seem to be scared of people because I walked up to the water's edge to get the picture. He was near a group of cypress trees. The animal we saw most frequently was turtles. I saw so many of them that I got tired taking pictures of them. I think they are called Red Ear Turtles and they are super scared of people. If they saw me walking anywhere near them, they would plop back in the water.

While walking by the swamp, we heard lots of frogs. I think there were bullfrogs and small normal frogs. I really wanted to see the bullfrogs but all I could find were the regular frogs (I don't know the name of the small frogs so I'm calling them regular frogs).

I took these pictures of Dave on an overpass on the swamp trail. This is the area where we saw turtles and heard frogs.

We saw several garter snakes. I couldn't get a good picture of them because they got scared and ran off. We saw 4-5 garter snakes throughout the park.

While we were riding our bikes, we saw a doe! David took this picture with his phone and we were able to get very close. I suspect people have been feeding this deer because she wasn't afraid of people. In addition to David and myself, there was a group of guys playing Frisbee golf right by the deer.

Here's a look at the Calcasieu River from a trail that follows the river. This trail is 1.6 miles long. We walked a little over 2 miles Saturday plus all the time riding bikes. We got lots of exercise!