Houston-ish

Next stop on our Texas journey: the greater Houston area.  Although there is a nearby Thousand Trails resort, we arrived in Houston on the Martin Luther King Jr holiday weekend and it had no availability.  As a result, we had two campgrounds to the north of Houston - the first was Spring Creek County Park, and the second was the Lake Conroe RV Resort Thousand Trails campground.

Spring Creek Park ended up being an absolutely wonderful stop, much to my surprise.  It was free and small (only 8 sites), so I had very low expectations.  However, we had full hookups (water, electric, AND sewer), a flat concrete pad large enough to easily accommodate our RV, and even our own personal trash can (most campgrounds require you to lug your trash to a central dumpster).  The sites were close together, but I expected that based on the pictures I found online, and really, for free full hookups, that's a very small price to pay.  The park was pretty sizeable, with your standard city park things (playground, baseball diamond, etc.) plus a disc golf course and an archery range!  Lots of unique looking picnic tables with grills, lots of open area to run around, and a few hiking trails.  SO nice!  We tried to extend our stay, but they were booked solid - no surprise!  Harris County has several free parks in the area, and if they're all like this...wow.

Spring Creek Park Campsite

Our next stop was not as wonderful.  Lake Conroe RV Resort was a little farther away from downtown Houston, so it took longer to get places.  They're the first Thousand Trails campground we've been to that doesn't accept USPS package deliveries - I had hoped to get our mail forwarded here, but will have to wait for the next campground.  They accept UPS and FedEx but only if you fill out a form first and pay $5 per package.  They also charged us $3/day for a 50amp site - with no option to just camp on a 'free' 30amp site because they don't allow the 'dogbone' adapters.  As a 50amp unit we have the potential to use more electricity, and the 50amp sites looked nicer in general, so I'm not against the $3 in principle...but the fact that the booking website made no mention of the cost nor the fact we couldn't camp on a 30amp site with our RV made me quite annoyed, because sitting there at the entrance gate we weren't really in a position to say no we won't pay and turn around and find another campground.  So, overall, they just really seemed out to nickel and dime you at this place.  So that's the bad.  The good...we stayed in the 'B' loop of the campground, which was pretty new and had *mostly* level VERY wide concrete pads.  They had just redone their laundry room, so there were a lot of new machines with the ability to pay by credit card, always nice during this coin shortage.  I met some really lovely people at the laundromat, including a widow who told me about how she went and bought a 37ft class A RV that she drove all over the country for 10 years after her husband passed away...amazing to me as I'm terrified to drive our RV!  The best feature of the campground was the lake access in the back of the park, which would have lovely sunsets on less cloudy days.

Lake Conroe Campsite

Cloudy sunset at Lake Conroe

Our major outing while in the area was a day trip down to Houston, where we visited the 1940 Air Terminal Museum and Space Center Houston.  The 1940 Air Terminal Museum was pretty fun, it was interesting to see how the original Houston airport planned for just two airlines and though that would be enough!!  One of the coolest things there was walking out to see one of their parked airplanes...right on an active taxiway!  We watched a Southwest airplane take off with no physical barriers between ourselves and the airplane...a rare experience for non-airport personnel post-9/11!

1940 Air Terminal - on an active taxiway!

We spent the afternoon at Space Center Houston.  The tram tour that allowed us to see some of the active training areas for astronauts was pretty cool.  The most interesting exhibits to us though were in the 'Independence Plaza.'  First, we got to walk inside one of the actual airplanes that ferried landed space shuttles back to the launch areas.  Then we got to walk inside a mock shuttle used in gliding tests (it never made it to space).  Finally, we got to see one of the actual SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets!!  This was especially cool since we'd seen the Falcon 9 launch at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

In front of the airplane carrying the mock shuttle

Real used Falcon 9 rocket!!

As we were leaving our second campsite, we got another livestock-on-the-road experience...this time with sheep!  I guess this is a Texas norm?

Sheep on the road leaving from the campground.  They appeared
to be on leads that allowed them access all the way to the road.

Our last experience is one of those 'so this is normal around here' moments.  I noticed that the road leading to the campsite here had the same 'name' as the road leading to our previous campsite...farm to market road.  This seemed too much of a coincidence, so I looked it up.  Apparently a farm to market road is an actual road classification in Texas.  It seems to be much like a county road or state road I would have expected in other states.  The program creates decent quality roads to link rural areas to urban areas, which is great for us since we'll be driving our monster of an RV on several roads like that to get to our campgrounds in Texas!  Very cool, and another item for my list of neat things I've learned about different areas of the country while traveling.