OUT OF SEQUENCE
LUNCH WITH JACKIE
The whole reason for being here is to see our goddaughter Jackie and her boyfriend if he’s available. Once we set up camp, she drove to our campsite and “scooped us up” and took us to this awesome Tex-Mex restaurant, Matt’s El Rancho, where we enjoyed visiting and eating with her. After lunch, she brought us back and we convinced her to try our electric bikes. She’s sold! It was very nice of her to work us into her busy day.
PLANNING AGAIN
We’re staying here an extra day to ride out another thunderstorm. Meanwhile, we’re planning our next 2-3 weeks. Planning is a pain! It takes a lot longer than you’d expect. This time, it took 5-6 hours to plan 2 weeks. We have reservations in Big Bend National Park February 27-March 1 so we had to fill in the blanks leading up to and after that stop. To make matters worse, this weekend is President’s Day, so all of the local state parks are booked solid for the weekend. We’ll go to a less popular city park in Kerrville where we were able to get reservations.
WEST TEXAS
West Texas is a different world. Many of the parks we had to call to make reservations because they didn’t support online reservations. You need to call and talk to a person. Some only take cash so we had to mail our money to them. One place said no reservations were necessary-they'd welcome ANY camper. At Sonora Caverns I asked what time they had tours and I was told “Thirty minutes after you get here!”
Water is scarce and so is gas. Some charge to fill up your water tank. Cell reception is non-existent in many of the areas we’ll be visiting. There’ll be stretches of several days without cell reception or internet. I hope there are showers…If nobody’s here, I guess it doesn’t matter, right?
Camping: McKinney Falls State Park, Austin, TX
Electricity, water, dump station, showers, Verizon 2 LTE