Small Home – Big Yard

Texas Bluebonnets

We made it to the east coast – well, the east coast of Texas.  We’ve now traveled almost 700 miles across Texas – and almost 1400 in total since leaving Colorado.  And, we finally found some of the wildflowers that Texas roadways are so famous for.  Dating back to 1965, the National Highway Beautification Act, known as the “Lady Bird Act” called for planting of wildflowers along federal highways.  With a home in the Texas Hill Country until her death in 2007, Lady Bird Johnson continued to lobby Texas to beautify highways.  Today, depending on the spring rains, you’ll see Bluebonnet, Texas Paintbrush, the pink Winecup, and the Yellow Primrose.  The colors were starting in the Hill Country, but here along the Coastal plain, they are in full bloom.  

Padre Palms RV Park

We arrived in Corpus about 4pm yesterday after doing a bit of shopping at the Kerrville Wal-Mart, passing through San Antonio and continuing all the way to the Texas Gulf Coast.  We initially had planned to stay at Padre Palms park, right on the beach SE of downtown Corpus.  But upon arrival we didn’t like the look of the park and opted to move to Hatch RV Park. 

Hatch RV Park

Hatch RV is just south of downtown.  If the other parks we’ve stayed in were “retirement” parks, this is a “working man’s” park.  For at least an hour starting at 5pm we had a ‘rush hour’ of people entering and leaving the park.  The rush started again about 6am this morning.  And, being parked right next to a speed bump, we got to enjoy many squealing breaks, squeaky shocks and then the acceleration away from the bump.  Needless to say, there wasn’t much sleeping after about 6am this morning! 

Hatch RV Pool & Hot Tub

But, overall this park is very nice.  We’re right next to the bathhouse, an older, but clean shower/restroom facility.  There are full hookups including 20+ channels of cable TV.  And, the clubhouse area including pool and hot tub is very nice.  The Wi-Fi works well and there is plenty of space between sites and lots of mature trees.  And they offer a few supplies – ice, TV connectors, maps, etc in a General Store.  

We’ll complete the final leg of the trip today when we turn south from Corpus Christi and drive along the coast to the lower Rio Grande valley.  We’re headed to Harlingen, a medium-sized city about halfway between Brownsville and McAllen where we’ll spend the next week.  We’re planning to be back on the road on April 8^th with the first night around Kerrville again.  I’m not sure how much I’ll get posted in the next week – but I’ll make sure to post when we’ve made the first stop on the way home. 

From the warm, humid Texas Gulf Coast…more later!

After leaving Balmorhea in west Texas, we’ve now arrived in the Texas Hill Country. The Hill Country is considered the most beautiful region in Texas by many, with forested, rolling hills, plenty of lakes and rivers and unique cities and towns. We’re near Kerrville, or about 500 miles from El Paso to the west and about 200 miles to Corpus Christi on the Gulf of Mexico to the east. Large towns in or near the Hill Country include Austin to the north and San Antonio to the south east. We’re only about 65 miles from San Antonio and will pass through today on our way to Corpus Christi.

Limestone formations of West Texas/Hill Country areas

We’re at Johnson Creek RV Resort, a medium size park with about 50 spaces. See the complete review of this park on a later blog posting.

We arrived here about 2pm after departing Balmorhea earlier than expected. The drive across was (and usually is) one of the least interesting of the trip. There’s just not much to see out there in west Texas. And, unfortunately we’ve seen very few wildflowers – Spring is slow arriving here in Central Texas.

Everything is going well with the truck & camper, and we’re beginning to get pretty good at the “depart camp” process including putting away all the “shore connections”, lowering and latching the pop-up roof, and stowing things so that they don’t shift in transit. Not that we haven’t forgotten a few things along the way – one roof tie-down for a couple hundred feet, an unlocked refrigerator door, an open propane bottle. But, nothing that has caused any problem. The set-up process is very smooth now – with full hookups everywhere, it’s very quick to get the hot water heater going, the water connection, electrical and TV cable plugged in. Lonie handles the interior items, pulling the jack cranks out, placing the stairs, cranking up the top and organizing the interior. Yes, we’re back to using the jack hand cranks – the one drill battery that we brought has given up – it lasted about 4 lower/raise sequences, but now we’re in need of a recharge.

We’re off toward San Antonio and then to Corpus Christi. The next posting will be from a beach on the Gulf Coast…

Whew – it was windy yesterday in Northern New Mexico. It was a bit breezy when we left Trinidad, blowing harder when we topped Raton Pass, and very, very gusty as we came further south. And, of course it was a headwind – how can it always be a headwind regardless of the direction we’re traveling on I-25?

We worked a few hours from Trinidad, had some breakfast, packed up and were on the road before noon. Trinidad was expecting snow overnight, so I’m glad we’re headed south. Here’s a picture I just found from Cuchara, Colorado, west of Trinidad near La Veta pass.

Other than a petrol stop, we drove direct to Santa Fe arriving around 3:00. We’re at Santa Fe Skies RV Park, a Good Sam park on the south side of Santa Fe. The park is very busy – we have one of the last two sites. There’s a RV rally in Albuquerque this weekend – I’m not sure if this is the stop before arriving at the rally, or just overflow from the rally. With the wind continuing to gust (up to 50mph the news said) we hibernated inside the camper, worked a few more hours and had dinner. We’re getting free, very good quality Wi-Fi here at the park and were able to watch TV via Hulu. Only about 40 miles north of Albuquerque, we also get plenty of “over-the-air” TV channels.

We made it!  The first leg of the trip, and hopefully the coldest, is behind us.  We left home about 4:30 yesterday and pulled into camp here at Lake Trinidad State Park about 8:30. 

Trinidad - and yes, that's snow!

After making our “shore connections” (an electric cord and a water hose) we poured a celebratory margarita, heated up some chili and had our first dinner in the camper.  We even managed to pull in ONE TV channel and watched the local Colorado Springs news and some of  the Jay Leno show. (thanks K&F for letting us borrow your TV – it works great!)

In my last post I mentioned that we’d had a bit of a challenge getting out-of-town.  As it turns out, we’re not quite experts at loading the camper on the truck.  We’ve only loaded this camper once, and K&F’s one time – so with 2 loadings under our belts, we obviously need more practice.  Starting around noon, after many failed attempts, we finally had the tie-downs secured around 3pm.  THREE hours to load – we both agree that we need to fix this problem. At this rate we’ll never get any boating done – we’ll spend all day in camp trying to load and unload the camper. 

But, the good news is that there are two important lessons learned from our loading adventure. 

1. 2×4’s laying on their side are very unstable!  Our Ford F-150 has taller side walls and cab than some other trucks.  As a result, the recommendation of Northstar was to use 2×4’s on edge to raise the camper to the required height.  From the factory, a “raiser kit”  is permanently installed under the camper. But, in our case – we can’t raise the camper or it won’t clear the garage door.  So, the 2×4’s are laid across the bed of the truck and the camper just drops in on top of them.  However, with the angle of the driveway and a dangling electric connection for the camper – we found that we couldn’t mange to keep the raisers upright.  Just as we’d get the camper ready to drop into the truck bed, one of the 3 raisers would tip over.  Unable to reach in to straighten it, we’d have to pull the camper back up and drive the truck forward to stand it back up.  Lesson Learned: Make a “box” of the 2×4’s so that they can’t tip over.
2. 3 dimensional angles can adversely affect loading.  As you can probably tell from the first pictures, we have a fairly dramatic downward pitch to the driveway.  When we rolled the camper out of the garage, we didn’t pay attention to getting it positioned straight down the hill.  As a result, we’re now dealing with a camper that is setting slightly crooked on the driveway, leaning downward AND tipping a bit to one side.  All of these angles conspired to keep the truck from meeting up with the camper on the desired schedule!  Lesson Learned:  Position the camper carefully when moving it out of the garage.