Starships and a Winter Storm

We spent about a week in Boca Chica, the southernmost tip of Texas.  We were routinely within a mile or so of the Mexican border as we drove around exploring the area, and passed through a couple of border control stations.  Our first 'campsite' was at Magic Valley RV Park, conveniently located just off the main highway from the Corpus Christi area.  The park was fairly vacant, and when I talked to one of the residents he said it was largely because so many of the Canadians didn't winter here this year due to COVID and the resulting travel restrictions.  The park had a nice laundry room and overall was a decent stay, though this same resident had his complaints.  Our second spot was at Park Place Estates.  This was a nicer park with more and nicer facilities and more residents - but it was still pretty empty.  Fortunately both of these places accepted discounts from our membership with Passport America - the Boca Chica area is full of high priced RV parks (by our standards), many of which are restricted to 55+.  I think both of the parks were adults only, so we're lucky we didn't have kids or we may have had to find a place at a more expensive park.  We saw signs saying "Welcome Winter Texans" all over the area - must be a popular snowbirding destination!

Magic Valley Park Site

Park Place Estates Site

The highlight of our trip here was a visit to the SpaceX test launch facility.  This was super cool since Starship 10 was sitting on the launch pad and Starship 11 was visible inside the open hangar doors.  Unfortunately the weather was a bit cloudy - our first sightings of Starship 10 showed it above the clouds - but it was still just really awe-inspiring to see.  We budgeted six days in the Boca Chica area just in case a launch was forthcoming...but the incoming winter storm destroyed that opportunity.

In front of the launch facility

Starship 10

Starship 11

The SpaceX facility is really pretty much in the middle of nowhere.  Just past the launch pads, the road ends in Boca Chica Beach.  We stopped and took a quick picture, but again it was too overcast to do much.

Boca Chica Beach

Our other major outing here was to Palo Alto Battlefield Historic Park.  This was the site of the first major battle of the US-Mexican War.  Interestingly in terms of military history, it was also the first time mobile artillery (aka "flying artillery") was a large component in a battle - the Mexicans had expected a normal hand to hand (or hand to horse) battle, but the superior artillery of the US army and its agility made it a very different battle.  The battlefield is well preserved, with flags outlining the positioning of the two armies.  This made it easier to envision the activities of the day...although the full impact of the battle is just unimaginable.  The Mexican forces suffered heavy casualties.

Sample artillery on the US side of the battlefield

Flags delineated the two front lines.  It was hard to see the 
American flags while standing at the Mexican flags, and
you can see from this picture how very far away even the next
flag in line is (it appears as a dot on the horizon).

Unfortunately, the last days of our trip were hit by the coldest weather Texas has seen in over a decade.  The lady who lives next door to our campsite said she'd been coming to this park for 27 years and had never seen anything like this weather before.  Just our luck!  We looked longingly at the Orlando temperatures during this time...  Fortunately we started out the cold spot at this most southern tip of Texas...as good as it could be.  However, we were slated to move on before the weather improved.  We had our next site booked just north of Corpus Christi, at a state park where we'd be farther from the coast in in the midst of trees (aka, much less wind), but further north so 7-10 degrees colder at night...we were looking at 18 and 10 degrees F.  What to do??  At the last minute the forecast updated to include snow on our travel day, so we extended our stay in Park Place Estates by another two days and cut our next camping trip short.  It ended up costing a bit of money but way less than causing an accident due to high winds and snow while driving 3 hours north.  

Icicles hanging from our awning

Ice-covered car

Ice-covered RV

The morning of our revised departure I tried to call the state park to check conditions...and no answer.  Fearing the power was out at the state park (and seeing online that the headquarters and bathrooms were closed), we extended our stay at Park Place Estates AGAIN...later we found out the state park was out of power and even later we saw the whole park was closed (from the booking website it looked like it extended almost a week - they must have had damage), so we definitely made the right decision...again.  Even so, starting that evening our park started participating in the rolling blackouts the rest of Texas was already enjoying.  We'd lose power for 2-3 hours and then gain it back for 2-3 hours.  The next day we heard that our NEXT state park destination was closed as well...and then we scrambled to find a couple of overnight stays en route to our final destination in Texas...a state park that has managed to remain open through all of this (though just as I was going to post this I looked and they're suddenly out of water...hopefully that will improve over the couple of days it takes to get there...).

Aaron's solution to see if the power came back on while we were
running our generator...plugged into the power pole

The milk aisle at the local WalMart

At this point I'm feeling very grateful that we're in an RV right now...this has given us the flexibility to alter our travel plans to be where the ice isn't, and the RV is designed to be off the grid, so our propane heat and refrigerator kept going despite our loss of power.  We were also able to disconnect our external water hoses and operate off our fresh water tank the couple of nights that the temperature dropped into the 20s...many people around town had burst pipes, as evidenced by a ridiculously crowded pipe/plumbing aisle at Home Depot!  During the daytime blackouts we were able to enjoy solar power from our solar panels.  I'm grateful for my handy husband who fixed both the heater and the refrigerator in the past few months and installed our solar panels a year ago!

Here's hoping we'll get the famed warm winter Texas weather moving forward!

Lake Corpus Christi

Our latest stop was at Lake Corpus Christi State Park, about 45 minutes north of Corpus Christi, Texas.  This state park had full hookups!  We had a pull through site here (meaning we didn't have to back in), and it was pretty cool that all spots on our loop were pull through parallel to the road, so that each RV received a pretty private view of the woods.  Getting out of course you could see your neighbors' fire pits, but looking through the windows we only saw our own personal patch of grass and trees.  The fire pits and picnic tables were very oddly aligned here - some sites had the two right next to where you would park your RV, but most sites (including ours) had the pair offset to be at the joint entrance/exit driveway between sites.  Aaron and I had different hypotheses on this...Aaron thinks the area used to be a day use/picnic area, and they kept the concrete slabs with picnic tables as they were when they added the campsites.  I think maybe they used to have shorter sites and expanded the site lengths to allow longer RVs (which are more common now than historically) but did not reposition the tables.  I guess we should have asked a ranger!

Our campsite at Lake Corpus Christi - our private 'party' area
as I call it was on the opposite side of the RV

We drove down into Corpus Christi and did something we thought was pretty unique...an escape room on the USS Lexington!  It is still pretty new and they're working out the kinks (we paid an 'introductory price'), but it was pretty cool to get into rooms on the aircraft carrier that aren't normally open to the public.  Due to COVID we got to do the room all by ourselves...sadly we did NOT win, partially due to a couple of those kinks and I'm sure largely due to having only 2 people in a 10 person room....but still, very fun!

Immediately after our failure

We enjoyed touring the rest of the USS Lexington.  We learned that the ship was used for most of the ship-based scenes in the movie Pearl Harbor.  Additionally, they had the actual plane used in Top Gun up on the flight deck!

Zoom in and read the seat labels if
you need to - it's the real thing!!  My 
matching shirt was a happy coincidence

Another day we drove down to the Padre Island National Seashore - another stamp in my national park passport!  We hiked their one short trail through the dunes and visited the beach.  Most uniquely though, we actually drove on the beach!  They have over 60 miles of beach you can drive on with a 4x4...the first 5 miles are suitable for most vehicles and RVs that want to camp there.  Camping there sounded a little too ambitious to me...I was too afraid of getting stuck in the sand...but it was fun to drive!

Walking in the Gulf

Driving on the beach!

On our way to the national seashore, we stopped by the flagship restaurant for the Whataburger chain, which started in Corpus Christi.  This restaurant had two stories and - big bonus during COVID - outdoor rooftop seating with a view of the Gulf.  Burgers were as delicious as advertised, and Aaron enjoyed their signature Dr. Pepper Milkshake.

Flagship Whataburger "by the bay"

Rooftop dining on the water!

The rest of our time we spent hanging around the state park.  The original facilities at the park were built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, and at least one of the original (main) buildings still stands.  There were several great places to look at the large lake, and one little clearing in the forest where they had a bird blind set up.  Cardinals were VERY common throughout the park.

Cardinal as viewed from the bird blind

Hiking on Lake Corpus Christi

Sunset on the lake

Oh yes...and on the ongoing engine saga...it seems to be over!  We had NO problem driving to this park - no power loss on the hills, and the check engine light stayed off.  Hooray!!  I'm very thankful to have a handy husband who can fix these problems even when we're camping away from everything we're familiar with.

Dinosaurs in San Antonio??

We spent a week at Medina Lake RV Campground just west of San Antonio.  What a great spot!  This was a Thousand Trails campground unlike any we'd ever been to before.  The sites were spacious and wooded and set up on these meandering loops that made you feel more like you were in a state park than an RV park.  This is easily my favorite Thousand Trails park to date.  Despite numerous warnings on the website about limited availability of full hookup sites (with sewer), we had multiple options for full hookups and got a large site near the lake.  As with other Texas Thousand Trails campgrounds, there was an upcharge for 50amp service, but here again we were allowed to use our dogbone adapter at a 30amp site, so no upcharge for us!

So spacious!

Sunset at Medina Lake

Another favorite here: the deer!!  This place was swarming with very tame deer.  Apparently the staff feed them.  It was magical to have the deer come so close to us, and watch bucks, does, and fawns stroll by our campsite at all hours.

This little lady wanted my popcorn

Deer deer everywhere!

And what you've all been waiting for from my last post...did we survive the journey??  Yes!!  It was a bit brutal.  I didn't realize it, but north and west of San Antonio is the Texas Hill Country.  As soon as we left the interstate (still 30 minutes from the campground), we found ourselves on narrow hilly roads...fortunately they were still mostly straight, but lots of steep hills.  A side effect of our broken transient suppressor was that our turbocharger wasn't working and fuel flow was not appropriately regulated to the engine...as a result, we CRAWLED over those hills, cresting some at 15mph (on 60mph roads).  Yes, the cars behind us in the no passing zone loved us so much they passed over a double yellow line...  It was extremely stressful, and a couple hills we thought we wouldn't make it over, but in the end we did.  We installed our transient suppressor and checked the code reader and the code disappeared...so hopefully the trip out goes better than the trip in!

In case you're wondering what a transient
suppressor looks like

 

Working through the floor in our bedroom to install the transient suppressor

This stop was FULL of fun things to see and do!  The weather was gorgeous and we made the most of it.  We biked and drove around Medina Lake a bit and were shocked to see how low it was.  This reminded us a lot of the sadly disappearing Mountain Lake back home.  For those who don't know, Dirty Dancing was filmed at Mountain Lake, and during our childhood the lake was full and beautiful.  However, over the last 20 years the fully natural lake has been draining for unknown reasons and is a mere puddle of its former glory.  So we did some research on Medina Lake, and it is a manmade lake that can get very dry during droughts - it was at 5% capacity during the 2010-2013 drought, but swelled to 100% capacity after some strong storms in 2015 and 2016.  A mere year ago it was at 80% capacity...down to 40% now.  So, while the sight is a bit sad at the moment, it seems that THIS lake WILL recover in time.  In the meantime, it was neat to walk all over an area we could easily tell was normally underwater.

This floating dock was in a bad state of disrepair, far from
its original location.  The lake normally fills to the top of the hill

Our first full day we drove into downtown San Antonio to our old friend the river walk.  It was wonderful to return to one of our favorite vacation destinations!  We're not sure if it was due to our January visit (we've never been in January) or COVID, or both, but there were FAR fewer people at the river walk during this visit.  We had NO problem getting an outdoor seat at a restaurant normally beyond crowded.  It was lovely though to have a (socially distanced) outdoor meal largely like all the others we've enjoyed outdoors on the river walk.  We returned on the weekend for another outdoor lunch and the crowds were slightly higher but still much lower than anything we experienced in our previous visits.

Lunch at Cafe Ole

Another view of lunch

Walking along the river walk

At Aunt Jane's suggestion, we drove up to 'nearby' (1.5 hours away) Fredericksburg for an afternoon.  We should have allotted much more time for this trip!!  On the way we stopped by The Coming King Sculpture Prayer Garden in Kerrville.  This was a beautiful spot for prayer & reflection with a 77'7" tall open cross at its center and lovely statues all around.

Near the entrance of the garden

Fredericksburg is a cute little German town, with German architecture and restaurants scattered throughout downtown.  We headed to the National Museum of the Pacific War (formerly the Nimitz Museum, so named for the admiral in command of the Pacific fleet during WWII who was born in Fredericksburg).  This was a large, informative, and overall just very well done museum we were shocked to discover in a small town in Texas.  Aaron's favorite part was the actual Japanese midget submarine (holding only 2 men) housed in the museum - one of five that attacked Pearl Harbor and the only one still intact.  We only spent an hour in the museum but should have budgeted three or four hours.

This is the top of a real submarine
mounted in a wave-like bush to look like 
it is surfacing from under the water

The Japanese midget sub

After the museum we rushed over to the nearby LBJ Ranch, a national park (so I got another stamp in my national park passport!).  We rushed through the driving tour of the ranch itself and got to the visitor center right as it was closing.  All of the buildings on site were closed due to COVID, but we strolled around the grounds and read the plaques on the outside.  We marveled at the hangar and air strips that Johnson installed so that he could conduct presidential business at the ranch.  Apparently he loved throwing barbecues for various dignitaries.  One of my favorite spots was his set of concrete "Friendship Stones" that he had each of his guests sign when they visited his "Texas White House."

Air Force "One Half" (nicknamed by LBJ due to its small size
- only small jets could land at his ranch) at the LBJ Ranch

Friendship Stones

I didn't realize that Texas had a wine country...but we drove right through it on this trip!  Our final stop on the Fredericksburg trip was a local winery offering tastings outside on their patio.  So fun!

Wine tasting at Signor Vineyards

Our final fun outing at this stop was to Government Canyon State Natural Area, where we saw dinosaur tracks!!  Apparently this is the only public park in the US where you can see dinosaur tracks still laying in place where they were discovered.  It was a 2.5 mile hike into the park on a wide flat trail to see the tracks at the base of a cliff.  We looked at them at the base of the cliff and then climbed above to see them from the top - a much better view.  This was so cool!!

The one and only print outside the ropes

Sauropod footprints

Theropod footprints as seen from the overlook

The true test of our transient suppressor fix will be our trip to our next destination...stay tuned!

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

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.