Rest Break in Central Texas

I'm sitting at my kitchen table, in Columbus, TX, gazing out at green grass, an overcast sky, and trees just beginning to green up. It reminds me very much of Minnesota in April... or May. We've been in central Texas for the past five days, following a grueling three-day travel spurt from Mesa, AZ.

When we made our travel plan, we decided we would push hard the first couple days out of Arizona and then stop for a few days to rest. We reasoned that since we would be "camping" at a Walmart, from which we generally get an early start in the morning, that we could cover more ground-- say, 350 miles or so each day. To you road-trip junkies, that probably sounds like nothing. And in my younger days, when the family and I routinely made trips from Idaho to California in three days, 350 miles would have seemed like poking along. But now, 350-mile days just make me tired and cranky. At the end of the day my body hurts, I have trouble smiling, and I generally feel like I've been tortured. Of course, Mark is totally unaffected (not!) After a short conversation about it, we have decided that even when we plan to dry-camp at a Walmart or truck stop, we will keep the miles to something around 250 and take longer rest breaks... for sanity's sake (not to mention marital health).

A view from our window out to Lake Medina

Our first resting stop was at a little off-the-beaten-path Thousand Trails park on Medina Lake, just east of San Antonio. Getting there reminded me of dreams I have of driving down wide roads that get progressively narrower until my car is impossibly wedged between two cement walls or dirt barriers. Fortunately, we made it to the park without encountering any wedging problems. (Nightmare averted.) The campground was not fabulous; it had no full hookup sites (at least none available), and only 30 amp power, but it was good enough for resting. We found a spot right by the lake and had very few neighbors for most of our three-day stay. The highlight of this campground was its deer population. At dusk, they would wander through the campground--on either side of our coach-- munching grass, dancing, and playing, on their way down to the lake for their evening drink, completely unafraid of the resident humans. The herd had to number somewhere between forty and fifty, with at least two bucks that we could identify. It was a delightful experience. I wanted to include a video I took of the deer, but sadly the file was too large for the blog size limit.

The gravel is where RVs used to park before the ground
gave way.

We arrived in Columbus on Saturday. The campground sits on the edge of the Colorado River. As a matter of fact, some of it sits IN the Colorado River, due to some serious erosion that was caused by the hurricane that wreaked havoc last year on Houston and the surrounding areas. It's a smallish park, and all of it's 50 amp full hookup sites were filled up, so we ended up again in a 30 amp site with no sewer. The sewer hookup isn't much of a problem for two or three days because our tanks will handle us that long and we just dump at the campground's dump station on the way out. It's the power that can make things a bit difficult. For instance, we can't run our basement air conditioner or heater on 30 amp power. On cold days, we can use the gas furnace, but on hot days like yesterday, we have to rely on the smaller rooftop cooler, which doesn't really reach back into the bedroom very well. The nights are still cool, though, and we slept with open windows.

Today I learned a little bit more about what it means to plug into 30 amp power when your rig is designed for 50 amp. You can't run the washing machine, the water heater, and the frig while simultaneously trying to bake something in the convection oven. About five minutes into baking muffins in my electric oven, it suddenly lost power. "The oven shut off!" I barked at Mark. "Do something!" While he hurried outside to "do something," I went around shutting off all things electric and switching over to propane all the appliances that can run on either propane or electric. In moments he had my oven working again. We'd blown the breaker. Thankfully, the muffins turned out fine in spite of their little ordeal. It looks like I still have a few things yet to learn about this lifestyle.

Tomorrow morning, we're heading for Galveston Island with a short stop in Houston for an oil change...one of those little inconveniences of living in your vehicle. Hopefully it will go smoothly and quickly.

Deer at Medina Lake campground.