The Outdoors in Midlothian, Texas

Midlothian Community Park is the town's athletic hub — nearly 22 acres with nine lighted soccer fields, a skate park, a playground, and picnic areas. It handles the league play and the weekend youth sports. In the center of town, Kimmel Park is the pretty one: a small, fenced downtown park with a bandstand, shaded playgrounds, and a quarter-mile walking loop under the trees.

Midlothian also keeps a 60-acre nature park with a hiking trail, a butterfly garden, a pond, a boardwalk, and native-grass areas — a quieter spot for a walk and some wildlife watching. Together they cover the range from ballfields to birdwatching.

The big outdoor draw is a short drive north: Cedar Hill State Park, more than 1,800 acres on the shore of Joe Pool Lake, within about a 30-minute drive of Midlothian. It's a full outdoor destination — hiking and mountain-biking trails, camping, and a lake for swimming, fishing, boating, and paddling.

Joe Pool Lake is the nearest big water, and the state park is the easiest way onto it, making a real outdoor day simple to reach from Midlothian.

Downtown Midlothian adds a landscaped one-acre plaza next to the Old Firehouse, with trees, flowers, and parking for the shops and restaurants around it — a pleasant spot to sit between errands.

Between the athletic park, the nature park, the downtown greens, and Cedar Hill State Park nearby, Midlothian has more outdoor variety than a lot of towns its size.