Greetings from Texas!

We finally make it to our first destination, Bastrop SP this week. We had a couple shake-down trips, the nicer of the two was Miller Creek RV park in Johnson City, TX, would definitely go there again. Despite threat of rain all weekend, we made it up to Bastrop in fine weather, got everything set-up long before the rain started. We felt like we had the park to ourselves, only 2 other trailers and a few tent campers in our campsite each night. Got plenty of photos where it looked like Howdy Pod’Ner owned the joint! (Will work on attaching photos.) The only trouble we had was parking the POD back in storage after 3 inches of rain in San Antonio. Made ruts about 6 inches deep, guess it might be worth it to shell out the extra $10 a month for hard surface storage. It’s the little things like that you only learn from experience. Oh and we had an unfortunate incident where we failed to chock properly and the POD slipped while unhitching due to the soft ground. Only cosmetic damage to TV and none to us, thankfully! It’s the BIG things like that you only learn from experience. Then you highlight, bold, and underline it in your RV Travel Checklist! We decided to hold off repairing the damage to TV for a while to remind us not to get over-confident and continue going slow and following checklist on subsequent trips. And to go especially slow when we have extra hurdles like soft ground!

http://www.texastribune.org/texas-state-agencies/texas-parks-and-wildlife/slideshow-bastrop-state-park-shows-signs-rebirth/

Bastrop SP was badly burned by wildfires over a year ago but the park is recovering well. Our campsite was lightly affected, but there were plenty of evidence of the terrible destruction nearby. I noticed that the places that were badly burned had more oak trees saplings than pine. I asked a park ranger and she said that the oaks were more resilient at coming back from the ground. They will execute controlled burns at a certain stage in the growth that favors the pine over the oaks. No plans to change the name from “Lost Pines” to “Lost Oaks”. The Houston Toad population is going strong if our sample set represents the entire park. I’ve never seen so many toads; and we have a pond in our backyard, so we have seen some toads! Also visited Buescher SP nearby, which was not affected by the fire.

The best experience of the weekend was the (slightly) cooler temps and enjoying the POD without the A/C blaring at night. Cracked the windows day and night and listened to the light percussion of the rain on the roof of POD. It’s interesting to read all the forum posts from folks up North, East, West who have winterized already and we just had our first trip without A/C! That’s not to say I didn’t sweat much of the daytime, but at night, it was crisp and lovely.