Colorado River...Texas

Next stop: halfway between Houston and San Antonio, a little town called Columbus.  We stayed at Colorado River RV Campground, another Thousand Trails campground.  It seems that the $3/day upgrade for 50amp power is pretty standard in Texas, as it was repeated here.  (So is the $5 fee for package delivery...)  However, the difference was that this campground DOES allow dogbone adapters, so we were just fine on the 'free' 30amp site we had apparently booked.  We were able to get a site right on the river...but the river was pretty low so we couldn't actually see it from our campsite.  The banks of the river were quite steep and a couple stories high...made me think of the other, better known, Colorado River that carved the Grand Canyon (absolutely NOWHERE near the same scale of course).

Our campsite at Colorado River

Unfortunately this was the first Thousand Trails campground I've ever been to where we didn't have a sewer connection.  We're used to this of course in public parks and can adapt to be fine without sewer, but it was a bit disappointing because I wasn't expecting a problem getting a sewer connection.  The next site I booked in San Antonio had warnings all over the booking site about how sewer sites were first come first serve, no guarantee, but this Colorado River campground had no such warnings, so I didn't even realize they had non-sewer sites until I pulled up the map the night before.  

The good though - this was a pretty neat campground in that most of it felt almost like a scout camp to me.  There were two small RV camping areas and one tent area, but MOST of the campground was just wide open area.  There were a couple of playgrounds, picnic tables scattered around, a pool, minigolf course, etc., but the VAST majority of the area was just open fields - with the corresponding deer at dawn and dusk!  They had a couple of nice wide flat hiking trails (much better for our mountain bike abilities!).  So I liked the overall feel of this campground.  I'm also thinking that a fire ring at Texas Thousand Trails is common....we hadn't seen it at any Thousand Trails campgrounds before Texas, but here again, just like Lake Conroe, there was a fire ring.  

A small sampling of the deer roaming the campground fields

This campground really was basically in the middle of nowhere, so there were no major attractions to see, but we had fun exploring more of the roadside America types of places.  While we drove around, we just really felt like we had finally found the 'real' Texas.  Everywhere we drove in this central region we were surrounded by cattle ranches with ornate metal entrance gates.  We passed a couple of livestock auction-looking places.  We also saw a LOT of small and sometimes sleazy looking 'land' real estate agent buildings that reminded us of all these types of businesses you see taking advantage of poor farmers in movies...hopefully it's not as bad as that in real life!

First on our tour of roadside America...we drove nearly all the way to Austin to Berdoll Pecan Farm.  They had an adorable massive squirrel out front of the store ('largest squirrel statue' I believe), a pecan/pecan pie vending machine (!!), and a store with all sorts of pecan based goodies.  We bought pecans of mixed flavor and popcorn...so good!  I recommend them if you tend toward nut purchases for gifts!

Giant Valentine's Squirrel!

24/7 Pecan Pie Vending machine!!

Next we stopped by one of the painted churches in the area.  They're pretty scattered around the region so we only stopped by one, but I feel like we must have picked the best one.  The inside strongly reminded us of a European cathedral - just so unbelievable given the unassuming country church exterior, and the fact that there are 20 of them in this one area of Texas!

St. Mary's Church in High Hill

Our last stop was the Kreische Brewery and Monument Hill State Historic Site.  This was a small little park with nice hiking trails.  The Monument Hill has a wonderful view of the valley and commemorates fallen soldiers from two Texan-Mexican conflicts, including the 'black bean incident', wherein a tenth of recaptured soldiers - those who drew a black bean instead of a white one - were executed.  The ruins of Kreische Brewery were pretty neat to see - so much impressive stonework.

Monument Hill - tomb and monument

View from the Monument Hill overlook

The remains of Kreische Brewery

And a last honorable mention roadside attraction - we drove by FreBo Ranch, right outside the entrance to our campground, several times and saw all sorts of neat animals, like zebra, buffalo, and some kind of small antelope.

Zebra!

In unhappy maintenance updates...our check engine light in the RV came on in Houston and the heavy duty code reader we ordered finally came in while we were here.  We appear to have a problem with our transient suppressor.  Unfortunately the code reader arrived at the end of the day Saturday, it took us until Sunday morning to perform the diagnosis for the error code, the one diesel parts store open on Sunday in the greater Houston/Austin/San Antonio area didn't have the part in stock, and we had to leave our campsite Monday by noon.  We discussed our options and decided to risk the drive to our next campsite in San Antonio, where we'll have 7 days to find the part, replace it, and see if we need to fix anything else.  (Our other option was to attempt - no guarantee - to extend our reservation at Colorado River by a day paying full $100+ nightly rate instead of free, attempt to get the part first thing Monday morning, work on it all day Monday and hope we finished in time and didn't discover any new check engine codes that needed fixing to trigger the same process the next day...lots of 'ifs' in that process, lots of rushing stress, and considerable extra cost.)  Not to leave you hanging, I'm writing this from the next site and we did make it...more details to come!

That's our bedside lamp turned upside down in an attempt to 
illuminate the lower half of the engine as we worked on 
troubleshooting into the night