Carrying on farther east from Huntsville State Park, we arrived at Livingston by 4 pm. I felt like we were running about 2 hours behind since we still needed to finish our day out setting up camp at Martin Dies Jr. State Park. Fortunately, Livingston is quite small and we managed to hit all the highlights in under an hour!

There’s only 6 trails in the park with the longest being 2 miles roundtrip. We chose a 1 mile loop called the “Pineywoods Boardwalk Trail.” The entire trail is, in fact, an elevated boardwalk and we got to check out a couple of nature viewing areas.

The majority of the property is waterfront centered with a massive boatramp that also boasts a retail shop, docks, piers and a CCC built observation tower. Most of the campsites have beautiful views of the large lake. It was odd to see residential homes immediately beginning on either side of the parks waterfront boundaries, though.

Like Huntsville, we had the park to ourselves on a Tuesday afternoon and we enjoyed the peace and quiet. It seems like it can get just as packed during peak times as well. We also found it had more luxury type amenities; but agreed that if we had to pick one to go back to, we would choose Huntsville. It’s trail availability and remoteness have more appeal to us.

-Lindsay