Beaver's Bend Camping & Kayaking

Last weekend we celebrated my husband's birthday by taking a camping trip to Beaver's Bend Oklahoma State Park.  This area is renowned for being a very beautiful state park, as well as its river fun.  It took us about 5 hours to drive there from Oklahoma City, so unfortunately we had to set up tent Friday night in the dark.  

We had to go buy a few more camping things before we left OKC.  Once we finished that, we stopped at Starbucks so I could buy Tyler a tasty drink for his birthday and for the road.  The nice thing about being a Starbucks gold card member is they usually write your name...but it doesn't always mean that they spell it right...

Okay, there we go.  We took a second look at the spelling this time.

Although we knew that sunset happening a good two hours before we arrived to the campground wasn't a good thing, it was great seeing the sunset from the car!

Finally we made it (after dark, this picture was taken a different day)!  Beaver's Bend State Park!

After setting up tent, we used the grill to cook our hamburgers and headed off to sleep.  

The next morning, Tyler made us a campfire so we could heat up our coffee!

(I might be a camping cheater, but making your coffee in a coffee pot BEFORE you go camping makes it much easier to just heat up instead of worry about how you're going to not get your coffee grounds in the coffee).

There we are drinking our warm coffee with no grounds in our awesome new camping mugs!

As soon as we ate lunch, finished setting up our camp area and found the park office, we headed over to Lucky Dog Resort Kayak Rentals in Broken Bow.  We'd read online about some other places, but this place ended up being a lot cheaper and really chill!  We rented two Kayaks for $25 each, and they shuttled us over to the river and picked us up when we were done (also we had no time limit, which was awesome) for free!  The other place we saw online had a $20 shuttle fee and a time limit.

There was a bachelorette party who was taking the shuttle over at the same time we did and kindly offered to take our picture!  Never thought of that for a bachelorette party, but it is a great idea!

About to get in the river!

It didn't take too long to hit some small rapids.  Tyler, being the "dare devil" he is, decided to take the most complicated route.  He got stuck, so I took pictures of him (while mischievously laughing) from down river where I was happily floating in my not-so-stuck kayak.

He finally got himself un-stuck and down he went!

The whole time we were on the river, I just kept thinking to myself that this doesn't look anything like Oklahoma!  It was so pretty...and for some reason early during my childhood I somehow decided that Oklahoma wasn't pretty and that it wasn't fun.  My opinion of Oklahoma has since changed, but sometimes I do find myself surprised about how cool Oklahoma can be!

Please excuse my camping hair.  :)

The cloudy day made the colors of the trees seem so much more vibrant!  It really was the perfect day for Kayaking...it was warm, not hot, not windy, and had scattered showers of the most warm and beautiful rain!

Tyler was sweet and held my Kayak for me so I could stay in the same place to take pictures of the scenery!

Isn't this gorgeous!?  I love the reflections on the river.

The birthday boy!

Shortly after we took our Kayaks down those rapids, we stopped at a rock to take some pictures of this area!  It was one of the pretties areas of the river, and Tyler seemed to think those rapids were of the most fun we'd been down.

 Look at that smiling face. :)

This particular spot, two branches of the river were coming together, so it was even prettier to be standing in the middle of the fork!

Here's a picture of the other branch of the river.

When we got further down the river, we reached a more calm section.  I'd say the last mile or so was relatively calm, and the fog from the weather that day was making the river look really awesome.

On our way back to our camp site, we saw a small group of deer.  They aren't really afraid of people, so we stopped to take some pictures of them.  :)

Saturday night we were rained on all night, which wasn't as fun since we didn't get to have a camp fire and s'mores, but Tyler and I both agreed that Kayaking was so fun that it made up for any uncomfortable parts of our camping trip!