We finally make it to our first destination, Bastrop SP thisweek. We had a couple shake-down trips, the nicer of the two was Miller CreekRV park in Johnson City, TX, would definitely go there again. Despite threat ofrain all weekend, we made it up to Bastrop in fine weather, got everythingset-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. Gotplenty of photos where it looked like Howdy Pod’Ner owned the joint! (Will workon attaching photos.) The only trouble we had was parking the POD back in storageafter 3 inches of rain in San Antonio. Made ruts about 6 inches deep, guess itmight 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 hadan unfortunate incident where we failed to chock properly and the POD slippedwhile unhitching due to the soft ground. Only cosmetic damage to TV and none tous, 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! Wedecided to hold off repairing the damage to TV for a while to remind us not toget over-confident and continue going slow and following checklist onsubsequent trips. And to go especially slow when we have extra hurdles likesoft 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 butthe park is recovering well. Our campsite was lightly affected, but there wereplenty of evidence of the terrible destruction nearby. I noticed that theplaces that were badly burned had more oak trees saplings than pine. I asked apark ranger and she said that the oaks were more resilient at coming back fromthe ground. They will execute controlled burns at a certain stage in the growththat favors the pine over the oaks. No plans to change the name from “LostPines” to “Lost Oaks”. The Houston Toad population is going strong if oursample set represents the entire park. I’ve never seen so many toads; and wehave a pond in our backyard, so we have seen some toads! Also visited Buescher SPnearby, which was not affected by the fire.

The best experience of the weekend was the (slightly) coolertemps and enjoying the POD without the A/C blaring at night. Cracked thewindows day and night and listened to the light percussion of the rain on theroof 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 withoutA/C! That’s not to say I didn’t sweat much of the daytime, but at night, it wascrisp and lovely.