Lost in OK

For the last several years, I, like almost all of my nerd brethren, have set aside their blogs and moved their rants, raves, quips and puns over to Twitter. When I first moved over to Twitter, I fell in love with the novelty of the 140 character limit. It felt like a Hemingway master class in brevity. It forced me to refine my thoughts and to make them punchy.

However, unlike Hemingway, Twitter discourages nuance and subtlety. Because the entire thought must be limited mostly to one sentence, you are rewarded for brutal simplicity. I’m coming to the realization that nuance and subtlety are ignored of at our own peril. Personally, I want to take a bit more time to work out my thoughts even if no one sees them.

Marfa was nothing short than a complete surprise. When I was last out in this country, Marfa was still unknown as the art community it had already become. To us, it was a small county seat out in the high desert, just one of those places to pass through to get down to the glories of Big Bend National Park. In fact, in the half dozen times I went to Big Bend in my youth, we never even went through there.

Off to the big city in the Airstream. I’m more of the wilderness type and Grace is definitely more the city girl so we try to mix it up with our travel locations. However, Austin is definitely a location we can both agree on.

The curse of the urban RV visit is that locations to stay in tend to be both over priced and over crowded. Thankfully, Austin provides a welcome alternative in McKinney Falls State Park. Just a few miles from downtown Austin, this amazingly expansive state park offers beautiful and enormous spots with lots of trails and incredible quantities of wildlife for essentially being in an urban setting. With the exception of the inevitible college kid party on the weekend (this is hook’em horn country after all) this place was a wonderful quiet home base for exploring the city. It also gave us a chance to have our first campfire since we’ve been on the road. Can’t believe it took us this long!

Urban RV camping can be a disappointing experience. Crowded sites, parking lot aesthetics, bright lighting, and really, all of the things that can ruin a sense of home. Thankfully, when visiting Austin, you have another option with McKinney Falls State Park. Only ten miles from downtown Austin, this relatively spacious park makes for a perfect home base when visiting the city of weird.

The spots are absolutely enormous with wooded separation between each site and plenty of land to spread out and enjoy the evenings. The sites come with a picnic table, fire ring with grate and a lantern pole. The sites are relatively level and paved. All sites have water and electric connections, but no sewer connections. However, the dump station is large and convenient.

So, we are finally on the road again and it feels great. We needed some time in Oklahoma to get our affairs in order and to spend much wanted time with friends and family. However, we were certainly ready to get back out on this new adventure of ours.

We started off our journey with a quick jaunt down to Dallas for a business meeting with a client. It’s a new experience hauling one’s house around for business meetings and a quite pleasant one at that. There’s something nice about being with family at home after business meetings in a strange city. We didn’t really get to spend much time poking around, but we’ve spent more than enough time in the big D and we were ready to hit the road.

We spent a week at this delightful small park on the outskirts of Beaumont, Texas in the suburb of Lumberton. While much of the park was severely damaged by recent flooding, great steps have been made in restoring the park and all of the electric/water spots are open. However, the walk-in tent spots are currently closed.

After the somewhat frantic out and back travel we did for the first three months in the Airstream, we were ready for a break. While we were enjoying the sights, having to head out to a location for only a week or two before heading back to Oklahoma was getting a little tiring. Since we had the holidays coming up plus the kids’ birthdays, we decided to stop traveling for the year in the middle of October.

Falling behind is always my terror in blogging. I’ll get busy, things come up and the next thing I know you I’m a couple of months behind on posts. I then feel overwhelmed with the amount of writing I have to do to get caught up mixed with guilt of not doing what I need to do. Then I just give up …

Well, I don’t want to give up so soon, so in this case I’m going to have to make a compromise to keep this thing going. So here are inadequate but necessary catch-up posts of our travels from the end of this year. I’ll try to be better going forward.

This is the sort of spot you dream about when you start thinking about RV travel. Admittedly, it’s not a secret, but with plenty of room for everyone, this is a spot not to be missed. And even though you won’t be alone, compared to many of the other campgrounds in the Grand Teton/Yellowstone area, you will feel like you are truely in wilderness.

Access is fairly straightforward for most sized rigs, though there are a couple of blind turns and a few spots where two rigs passing would be difficult. If you have a tow vehicle, I would recommend sending the second vehicle up to the top to hold traffic. That said, we never had a problem on the four times we took the trailer along the road. Traffic is generally very light.