Farewell Spring Branch
Tomorrow we pull up the mat and head out. I am actually feeling a tinge sad to leave here.
To be honest, I have not written about how quiet it is here off in the low woods of the Hill Country. And I have only told you the most outrageous stories of life here in the campground. In fact, everyone here is very nice, if a little off in some siding. We have enjoyed our stay. The additions to the two cabins are kind of nice, with peeled rustic cedar posts on the porches and cedar siding. The clearing of the cedars down below has let views of the hills show. The Owner will probably not make much money, and the campground will never be 4 star material, but it is a lot better than some places I’ve been.
I will miss the view out the west side window, where my birdfeeder was hanging. As the days get longer, more and more grass is coming up, tiny yellow mustards and purple prairie verbenas are blooming here. There are a lot of peach colored butterflies darting around. The deer, who stayed close for handouts, are now scarce around here, the grass is up everywhere. On a geocaching trip on the west side of San Antonio, I saw a tiny white kind of anemone , and a blue flower sort of like a cranes bill (baby blue eyes ?) and what might be a local spring beauty busy under the trees. I can’t find the names of any of them. I would need way too many wildflower books to cover the places I go.
The strange cactus has grown a green beard along the top of each big flat plate of a leaf. I don’t know if this will be new leaves or flowers. The trees are not showing any signs of leaves yet. We will miss the much ballyhooed bluebonnets, which are lupines. I guess they cover everything with a sheet of blue in April. Most of the art stores have lots of earnest paintings s of scenes with the bluebonnets in bloom. Since we will be touring around in TX for the next month, I may get to see them, and also to see if this dry country ever really does get green. There seem to be a great number of creeks that I have never seen a drop of water in. They do look scoured, and in some of our forays we have seen the rubbish left by a flash flood in low areas. But there really is no topsoil in most of this area, only in the river bottoms, so I’m guessing the rain goes right down through the porous limestone into the aquifer.
We have spent the last few days getting the trailer ready. Since this will be our first real trip in it, and we tend to just live in it as if it was a house when we are parked for so long, a lot of stuff needs to be stowed away, tied down or padded so it doesn’t break while we go down the road. After 300 miles we will know for sure what is going to fall down, but right now we are just guessing and hoping. Having a rear kitchen is allegedly hard on the dishes, we have been told, some folks put padding in between each plate and glass. We also have to make a great list of stuff that needs to be done, partly because it is a new trailer, but partly because we just forget the routine of being on the road.
Last night, the Owner took us out for a farewell dinner in a town called Gruene TX. That’s pronounced Green, settled by a German family of that name. Its chief claim to fame is Gruene Hall, an old wooden Dance Hall that has seen the best of country and western performers, and indeed gave a lot of them an early start. The oak floor is nearly worn through and has been thoroughly stomped by millions of dancing cowboy boots, so it has waves in it and I guess when people are dancing the whole thing moves around like river rapids. It has a stage at one end and wooden tables, and a bar out on the street side, and the inside has been left to age more or less gracefully. The rest of the little town has kept itself old, and in a fairly genuine way, although there are an inordinate number of B & B’s and the stores are selling tourist stuff. The Gristmill restaurant is half ruined, and much of it is open to the sky, in an inner roofless room a redbud tree was blooming its head off and there were cactus perched on the top of some of the old stone walls. The outside eating area is a series of stairs and platforms in wood and pipe that spill over the edge of a bluff with the Guadeloupe River rushing below. The food was good and the ambience very magical. We had a good time with the Owner too. He is an interesting, nice guy, even if he is very frustrating to work for.
Next morning, we folded our “tent” up and took off. This is always a moment that makes both of us a bit anxious, even thought we have done it hundreds of times. There are a lot of things to do wrong that will break something, or even worse be a problem while on the road. Plus, everyone sort of watches what you are doing, so if you do mess up, it is pretty public. When we stopped for lunch, only a few things had fallen off the desk, and the trailer pulled well, even with a stiff headwind.
Our destination is an RV resort on Lake Whitney TX, north of Waco. The chain is called A Thousand Trails, and they have camping resorts around the country. Like Hart Ranch, they are a membership only campground, so we came in on a sales deal. We got 3 days and 2 nights free for listening to the sales pitch. They have a really nice place here, 400 acres and only a few areas that are developed. The people who started it made a commitment to be a preserve, and leave a lot of space untouched. Most campgrounds and resorts see unused space as an opportunity to jam even more sites and buildings in, but this place has acres to wander through. We listened to the pitch, and although we don’t need to rent cabins, or take part in their time-share condo system, we probably would have joined just because the resorts are so lovely. But we don’t have $5,000 to spend, so we said no thanks.
We are still in the Hill Country here, and the cedars have choked everything else out. They are nearly the only tree that thrives on pure rock and no rain. They make a dense woods, nothing will grow under them and their low branches make any bushwacking impossible. It is also kind of like walking in a maze, since you never get any views. We drove through several areas that did have top soil and there were flat fields of green grass or stubble, but most of this land has had no chance to add a layer of soil on the rocks.
Last night, we went for what we figured would be a short walk. Since a lot of campgrounds have a hiking trail that is ¼ mile at the most, we were not prepared for it to be over 2 miles long. It felt good after sitting all day, but it was a lot longer than intended. Today Don went to play golf, so the dog and I took off for a serious ramble.
From the satellite view of this place (Google earth) it appears that it was once a much bigger campground. To the north of the main road a whole web of lines in the cedar can be seen. The guy that did our sales talk didn’t know the history of this place, so I decided to walk up there with Pepe and see. From the ground, the access roads were nearly invisible, sometimes one path would look promising only to end. The further north I got, the more ATV tracks there were, looping everywhere and not caring if they met a dead end. We got above the old campsite area and began to skirt the edges of the houses and yards. I often had to backtrack, but since exercise was the point and the weather was perfect we didn’t mind. We crossed and re-crossed a creek, finding one place deep enough for Pepe to have a swim. We finally came out way to the west of the campground, I would have had to swim a sizeable creek to go as the crow flies, so we backtracked. It’s odd that I don’t think to go on rambles like this often, because I really enjoy them. On the otherhand we are not often in a place where I can just go do it.
On the ground, the leaves of the blue bonnets are everywhere, small silver haired five fingered clusters, a much smaller plant than the lupines of New England. Some say that it has been too dry for a really good show, but the plants are everywhere.
Next day, we headed for the Mt Pleasant area to visit with Don’s daughter, kids, grandkids, and great grand kids. We are at a State Park, Lake Bob Sandlin, in Pittsburg TX. Nice piney wooded sites on a lake. The mapping program aimed us at the back maintenance gate and we had an exciting time getting turned around on a dead end road. Technology is not always our friend….
The family, all 7 of them, came over for a hastily prepared dinner, and a nice visit. I was a little nervous before, but they are all great people and very happy to see Don and happy to meet me.
The next day was filled with visiting and catching up for the family. We did a geocaching hike, and I extended it with Pepe to work off a big truck stop breakfast. Just as well, dinner was at an excellent Italian restaurant, and there will be more piles of good food to come.
The park is in the piney woods, and they look like woods almost anywhere in what we called in Social Studies the Woodlands. Out by the road there are some palmettos, and the funny wings on the twigs of the gum tree and the winged elm trees are a bit odd. I know that these are not the oaks, pines and maples of New England, but it feels very familiar and homey. There are no leaves yet, but the grass is coming up everywhere and more little flowers that I don’t know.. In the fields are masses of cattle all looking very postcardish on the electric green expanses of pasturage.
The cattle seem to be a wider range of breeds around here. In MT and WY and SD the white-faced Hereford and Black Angus are still pretty much the breeds of choice although crossing the two is popular too. Here the temperature and the humidity in summer probably requires more of those breeds that are used to stand heat like the Brahma, the red Santa Gertrudis, and the glamorous Long Horns. We stopped by one upscale breeding operation that is raising Kobe beef. Japan came late to beef for religious reasons, but after the soldiers came home from the war in Korea, they began to breed smallish black cattle, feed them very carefully, keep them in small pens, and give them massages to keep the meat tender. We were given 4 steaks which we cooked outside and they were not quite as melt in the mouth as the $50 a lb. Kobe beef, they were pretty incredible and very tasty with a lot of marbling. They sell only by mail order or to way up scale restaurants like the one in NYC that has a $50 hamburger.
The town, Pittsburg TX, is a one company town: Pilgrim Pride. This is a huge chicken operation. The Company provides the chicks, the feed and supervises every aspect of the growing , slaughtering and trucking. The huge feed towers dominate the sky, there is a Pilgrim Bank, a sort of bell tower in the center put up by the big boss. The Boss actually lives in Dallas, but has a large ostentatious chateau outside of town with the pilgrim logo on all the gates. Several areas of the town have largish homes, but mostly it seems people are at the mercy of the low wages that the chicken king pays. Even the thought of what goes in the chicken killing sheds makes me shudder. There are even more Pilgrim Pride factories in the next town north, Mount Pleasant, including a 20’ full color plastic bust of the main founder, Bo Pilgrim, in a pilgrim hat. Apparently this is the second largest chicken producer, second to Tyson.
We moved on south, into more and taller pines and oaks, some serious lumbering going on, and acres and acres of open fields with cattle. 2 nights on Lake Conroe, at a campground with water access and the usual tight filing system. We came here to go see some lots on Lake Livingston that Don has owned for 40 years. We did a little geocaching and now have moved further south.
Spanish moss has reappeared on the big live oaks, there are more palmettos in the brushy areas, and lots of lakes and creeks with water. We are now south of Houston, and I can feel the affect of the Gulf. The air is fitfully windy, and soft with moisture. I know it would be unbearable in the summer, but I like it just fine. This campground is very tidy, lawns and concrete pads, all lined up in one line . My kitchen window looks over the golf course. Nice to have a level site, we had to build a tower in Lake Conroe to get level. We are here to meet an old friend of Don’s and visit for a few days. I will get a tour of NASA, and go to the beach!
To be honest, I have not written about how quiet it is here off in the low woods of the Hill Country. And I have only told you the most outrageous stories of life here in the campground. In fact, everyone here is very nice, if a little off in some siding. We have enjoyed our stay. The additions to the two cabins are kind of nice, with peeled rustic cedar posts on the porches and cedar siding. The clearing of the cedars down below has let views of the hills show. The Owner will probably not make much money, and the campground will never be 4 star material, but it is a lot better than some places I’ve been.
I will miss the view out the west side window, where my birdfeeder was hanging. As the days get longer, more and more grass is coming up, tiny yellow mustards and purple prairie verbenas are blooming here. There are a lot of peach colored butterflies darting around. The deer, who stayed close for handouts, are now scarce around here, the grass is up everywhere. On a geocaching trip on the west side of San Antonio, I saw a tiny white kind of anemone , and a blue flower sort of like a cranes bill (baby blue eyes ?) and what might be a local spring beauty busy under the trees. I can’t find the names of any of them. I would need way too many wildflower books to cover the places I go.
The strange cactus has grown a green beard along the top of each big flat plate of a leaf. I don’t know if this will be new leaves or flowers. The trees are not showing any signs of leaves yet. We will miss the much ballyhooed bluebonnets, which are lupines. I guess they cover everything with a sheet of blue in April. Most of the art stores have lots of earnest paintings s of scenes with the bluebonnets in bloom. Since we will be touring around in TX for the next month, I may get to see them, and also to see if this dry country ever really does get green. There seem to be a great number of creeks that I have never seen a drop of water in. They do look scoured, and in some of our forays we have seen the rubbish left by a flash flood in low areas. But there really is no topsoil in most of this area, only in the river bottoms, so I’m guessing the rain goes right down through the porous limestone into the aquifer.
We have spent the last few days getting the trailer ready. Since this will be our first real trip in it, and we tend to just live in it as if it was a house when we are parked for so long, a lot of stuff needs to be stowed away, tied down or padded so it doesn’t break while we go down the road. After 300 miles we will know for sure what is going to fall down, but right now we are just guessing and hoping. Having a rear kitchen is allegedly hard on the dishes, we have been told, some folks put padding in between each plate and glass. We also have to make a great list of stuff that needs to be done, partly because it is a new trailer, but partly because we just forget the routine of being on the road.
Last night, the Owner took us out for a farewell dinner in a town called Gruene TX. That’s pronounced Green, settled by a German family of that name. Its chief claim to fame is Gruene Hall, an old wooden Dance Hall that has seen the best of country and western performers, and indeed gave a lot of them an early start. The oak floor is nearly worn through and has been thoroughly stomped by millions of dancing cowboy boots, so it has waves in it and I guess when people are dancing the whole thing moves around like river rapids. It has a stage at one end and wooden tables, and a bar out on the street side, and the inside has been left to age more or less gracefully. The rest of the little town has kept itself old, and in a fairly genuine way, although there are an inordinate number of B & B’s and the stores are selling tourist stuff. The Gristmill restaurant is half ruined, and much of it is open to the sky, in an inner roofless room a redbud tree was blooming its head off and there were cactus perched on the top of some of the old stone walls. The outside eating area is a series of stairs and platforms in wood and pipe that spill over the edge of a bluff with the Guadeloupe River rushing below. The food was good and the ambience very magical. We had a good time with the Owner too. He is an interesting, nice guy, even if he is very frustrating to work for.
Next morning, we folded our “tent” up and took off. This is always a moment that makes both of us a bit anxious, even thought we have done it hundreds of times. There are a lot of things to do wrong that will break something, or even worse be a problem while on the road. Plus, everyone sort of watches what you are doing, so if you do mess up, it is pretty public. When we stopped for lunch, only a few things had fallen off the desk, and the trailer pulled well, even with a stiff headwind.
Our destination is an RV resort on Lake Whitney TX, north of Waco. The chain is called A Thousand Trails, and they have camping resorts around the country. Like Hart Ranch, they are a membership only campground, so we came in on a sales deal. We got 3 days and 2 nights free for listening to the sales pitch. They have a really nice place here, 400 acres and only a few areas that are developed. The people who started it made a commitment to be a preserve, and leave a lot of space untouched. Most campgrounds and resorts see unused space as an opportunity to jam even more sites and buildings in, but this place has acres to wander through. We listened to the pitch, and although we don’t need to rent cabins, or take part in their time-share condo system, we probably would have joined just because the resorts are so lovely. But we don’t have $5,000 to spend, so we said no thanks.
We are still in the Hill Country here, and the cedars have choked everything else out. They are nearly the only tree that thrives on pure rock and no rain. They make a dense woods, nothing will grow under them and their low branches make any bushwacking impossible. It is also kind of like walking in a maze, since you never get any views. We drove through several areas that did have top soil and there were flat fields of green grass or stubble, but most of this land has had no chance to add a layer of soil on the rocks.
Last night, we went for what we figured would be a short walk. Since a lot of campgrounds have a hiking trail that is ¼ mile at the most, we were not prepared for it to be over 2 miles long. It felt good after sitting all day, but it was a lot longer than intended. Today Don went to play golf, so the dog and I took off for a serious ramble.
From the satellite view of this place (Google earth) it appears that it was once a much bigger campground. To the north of the main road a whole web of lines in the cedar can be seen. The guy that did our sales talk didn’t know the history of this place, so I decided to walk up there with Pepe and see. From the ground, the access roads were nearly invisible, sometimes one path would look promising only to end. The further north I got, the more ATV tracks there were, looping everywhere and not caring if they met a dead end. We got above the old campsite area and began to skirt the edges of the houses and yards. I often had to backtrack, but since exercise was the point and the weather was perfect we didn’t mind. We crossed and re-crossed a creek, finding one place deep enough for Pepe to have a swim. We finally came out way to the west of the campground, I would have had to swim a sizeable creek to go as the crow flies, so we backtracked. It’s odd that I don’t think to go on rambles like this often, because I really enjoy them. On the otherhand we are not often in a place where I can just go do it.
On the ground, the leaves of the blue bonnets are everywhere, small silver haired five fingered clusters, a much smaller plant than the lupines of New England. Some say that it has been too dry for a really good show, but the plants are everywhere.
Next day, we headed for the Mt Pleasant area to visit with Don’s daughter, kids, grandkids, and great grand kids. We are at a State Park, Lake Bob Sandlin, in Pittsburg TX. Nice piney wooded sites on a lake. The mapping program aimed us at the back maintenance gate and we had an exciting time getting turned around on a dead end road. Technology is not always our friend….
The family, all 7 of them, came over for a hastily prepared dinner, and a nice visit. I was a little nervous before, but they are all great people and very happy to see Don and happy to meet me.
The next day was filled with visiting and catching up for the family. We did a geocaching hike, and I extended it with Pepe to work off a big truck stop breakfast. Just as well, dinner was at an excellent Italian restaurant, and there will be more piles of good food to come.
The park is in the piney woods, and they look like woods almost anywhere in what we called in Social Studies the Woodlands. Out by the road there are some palmettos, and the funny wings on the twigs of the gum tree and the winged elm trees are a bit odd. I know that these are not the oaks, pines and maples of New England, but it feels very familiar and homey. There are no leaves yet, but the grass is coming up everywhere and more little flowers that I don’t know.. In the fields are masses of cattle all looking very postcardish on the electric green expanses of pasturage.
The cattle seem to be a wider range of breeds around here. In MT and WY and SD the white-faced Hereford and Black Angus are still pretty much the breeds of choice although crossing the two is popular too. Here the temperature and the humidity in summer probably requires more of those breeds that are used to stand heat like the Brahma, the red Santa Gertrudis, and the glamorous Long Horns. We stopped by one upscale breeding operation that is raising Kobe beef. Japan came late to beef for religious reasons, but after the soldiers came home from the war in Korea, they began to breed smallish black cattle, feed them very carefully, keep them in small pens, and give them massages to keep the meat tender. We were given 4 steaks which we cooked outside and they were not quite as melt in the mouth as the $50 a lb. Kobe beef, they were pretty incredible and very tasty with a lot of marbling. They sell only by mail order or to way up scale restaurants like the one in NYC that has a $50 hamburger.
The town, Pittsburg TX, is a one company town: Pilgrim Pride. This is a huge chicken operation. The Company provides the chicks, the feed and supervises every aspect of the growing , slaughtering and trucking. The huge feed towers dominate the sky, there is a Pilgrim Bank, a sort of bell tower in the center put up by the big boss. The Boss actually lives in Dallas, but has a large ostentatious chateau outside of town with the pilgrim logo on all the gates. Several areas of the town have largish homes, but mostly it seems people are at the mercy of the low wages that the chicken king pays. Even the thought of what goes in the chicken killing sheds makes me shudder. There are even more Pilgrim Pride factories in the next town north, Mount Pleasant, including a 20’ full color plastic bust of the main founder, Bo Pilgrim, in a pilgrim hat. Apparently this is the second largest chicken producer, second to Tyson.
We moved on south, into more and taller pines and oaks, some serious lumbering going on, and acres and acres of open fields with cattle. 2 nights on Lake Conroe, at a campground with water access and the usual tight filing system. We came here to go see some lots on Lake Livingston that Don has owned for 40 years. We did a little geocaching and now have moved further south.
Spanish moss has reappeared on the big live oaks, there are more palmettos in the brushy areas, and lots of lakes and creeks with water. We are now south of Houston, and I can feel the affect of the Gulf. The air is fitfully windy, and soft with moisture. I know it would be unbearable in the summer, but I like it just fine. This campground is very tidy, lawns and concrete pads, all lined up in one line . My kitchen window looks over the golf course. Nice to have a level site, we had to build a tower in Lake Conroe to get level. We are here to meet an old friend of Don’s and visit for a few days. I will get a tour of NASA, and go to the beach!
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