Texas is a place you have to experience first hand. It's no good reading about it in books or listening to the tall tales of your friends and relatives. When they say everything is BIGGER in Texas, residents are most likely talking about the portion size of the barbecue ribs or the expanse of border to border prairie. I get that for sure. But we've found lots of other things that seem bigger by far. For instance, when they decide to tear up part of their interstate highway system they don't piddle around with a half mile section where fifty guys can be found toiling away with earth movers and dump trucks for several months. No, here in Texas when they decide to refurbish the interstate they hire three thousand guys to tear up 30 miles or so of roadway and call it "just the beginning." Here in the Dallas/Fort Worth section of this giant state we've been driving by those four-foot-tall orange traffic barriers for so long that we're beginning to regard them as part of an invading army. They sort of look like pumpkin-colored aliens massing for some sort of takeover. Watch the news. If the country gets invaded by orange beings, I can tell you it's probably coming from Texas.
There's so many highways torn up around Dallas/Fort Worth that it sends our GPS unit into near apoplexy. One moment you're on the regular path of the highway where the lady inside the GPS unit expects you to be, and the next you're somewhere off on a nearby access road detour where she's just sure you've blatantly disregarded her carefully thought out instructions and/or lost your mind. So, you spend many minutes trying to comfort the little lady and move as quickly as you can back onto the original highway path before she completely abandons you to your fate.
Anyway, such has been our experience so far. Our mission in coming to D/FW was to visit my brother's daughter, Sherry, and her husband and two new babies. In addition I wanted to visit with my high school chum, Jorja, and her husband, Tim. Both parties lived nearly in the same geographic area. So, we tried to find a camping spot quite near both of them to cut down the travel time for visits. This we did, and quite surprisingly, we stumbled onto the Lakeside Public Campground in Lewisville, Texas, and it was beautiful.
In fact, the Lewisville camp was just about the most wonderful camp spot we've run across yet, what with all the mature trees and lake vistas. There was really only one potential downside, their lack of sewer connections. But before I could fret about that lack, the lady at the check-in counter said, "and that will be $8.00 please." Well, I couldn't argue with the price. We customarily pay at least $20.00, and often pay as much as $40.00 for a space. So, even though we would have to use a dump station on our way out the next morning it was well worth it.
Once we had established our claim to a spot for the night, we parked the RV in our designated space, had our lunch, then set out once again to find niece Sherry's home. This we did with the usual attendant confusion of the GPS as we threaded our way in and out of several construction confusion zones. Still, by early afternoon we had found the proper house, and were helping to entertain TWO newborns for a couple of hours, which took a little pressure off of mom.
After a couple hours of visiting and baby cuddling we hit the road again and found our way back to our lakeside camp. In quick time we had the truck all set up (easier without the sewer parts) and ready to go for the night. After that we arranged by Facebook to have my classmate from my John Muir High school days to pick us up and we all set out for a nearby restaurant for dinner. Though our intention was to find Italian food, the confusion of freeway construction sent us off in odd directions, and we eventually changed our plans to incorporate an Asian restaurant that we stumbled over. No matter, the restaurant turned out to be great, especially the egg rolls in my opinion (photo right). What followed was a rousing couple of hours of reliving our childhood adventures in southern California and, for Jorja's husband, Tim, and I, adventures in the U.S. Navy. Back in the mid 1960s, Jorja and I and a mutual chum spent many a blissful day on the ski slopes in the mountains above Los Angeles. Hard to fathom that it's been nearly forty years since those carefree days full of powder snow and happy camaraderie.
Though the crush of rush-hour traffic did not permit stopping for photos, on our way south out of Dallas this morning Concetta and I passed through and beneath some of the most impressive finished freeway construction we had ever seen. As many as six and seven levels of flyovers rose above us in some places, all displayed in designer colors and looking for all the world like something out of the Jetsons TV show. The complex of super highways over super highways was just the BIGGEST such project that we had ever seen, bar none and we were glad to have been able to appreciate the "after" since we'd put up with so much of the "before."
Soon, however, we were bound away to the southeast, driving semi-rural route 175 to avoid the more heavily traveled "blue" roads with their attendant bevy of speeding 18-wheelers. The weather continued rainy and gray, which made stopping for photos less than appealing. I do wish I had made one stop, though the photo op took place in the blink of an eye and we were past it before I could find a place to pull over. You may remember, if you've watched American Pickers for any length of time, that Mike Wolf is absolutely gaga over Volkswagens. Well today we passed a sort of Beetle graveyard as we rolled out of Dallas that truly dwarfed anything Mike has shown on his TV series. I kid you not when I say that this place had at least two hundred bugs and another hundred VW vans. And that may be a conservative estimate. It was an awesome collection!
The only photos I took today were of this sad little town with buildings arranged around a park-like square. Half the buildings were unused and the entire police department was ensconced in a storefront between a Laundromat and a nicknack store. But what pulled me off the main highway to explore down a side street, and to discover this particular town square, was the great old Coke sign on one of the abandoned buildings. It was too cool. There was not much else to see on the square as the whole place was just a few years away from disappearing altogether I suspect. They did have a really neat log cabin that I found when I rounded one corner off the square. Not sure how old it was, or whether it had been restored or just left alone for a century and a half, but I stopped to appreciate the workmanship of the builders) anyway.
Right now we're in a KOA in the town of Rusk which lies on a mountain top southeast of town and was almost deserted when we got here. Contrary to what we've been experiencing so far, we could almost pick the view we wanted as virtually all the camp spots were empty. Since then about six or eight others have arrived, but most sites are still empty. And, because there's not many folks to make use of it, the internet functions almost as good as we experience back home. Tomorrow we're drifting over to Nacogdoches which lies along route 21 running east from here. We've read that there's lots of interesting things to do there and we hope, since we did mostly driving today, that we'll be able to fritter away some quality time there. Nacogdoches is only about forty miles from the Louisiana border, so sometime tomorrow we're probably going to be leaving Texas.
I'm still formulating my opinion of the state. Parts of it are not very prosperous looking. Parts of it look very rich, like they have money to burn and intend to do so. And yet parts were so litter-strewn that we could scarcely believe it. Other parts were magnificent in their beauty. The roads are terrible. The roads are terrific. The people, wherever you see them, appear to be industrious and hard working. And they're always helpful and friendly, at least to us. We've liked the state and we've disliked it. We haven't liked the weather at all, as mostly it's been cold. The sole hot day we had was WAY too hot and muggy for our tastes, and it's only March. I suspect that come August we'd feel like we had wandered into Panama or somewhere like that.
You can't help but compare your home to wherever you're traveling and, of course, we've been doing that right along. Though I grew up in southern California (otherwise known as paradise on earth -- at least it was in the 1950s), I still prefer Carson City, Nevada to all the places through which we've traveled. So it's safe to say that there's no danger of our pulling up stakes and leaving our high desert home where the humidity barely exists and nearly every day is sunny and clear. But it does help to see these other places, if nothing more than to solidify that observation.
As of today we've been gone for 22 days and have driven over 3,000 miles in search of adventure. It may be inconvenient at times. The traffic may tax your patience and test your nerve, but there's nothing like hitting the road. There's something new and exciting around each and every corner. You just have to "Keep on Traveling!"
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