On the Road: Big Spring, TX, to Quitaque, TX

We pulled out of Texas RV Park about 7:30 the morning of Sunday, August 19. After a brief stop at McDonald’s for coffee and parfaits, we were on the road heading north shortly after 8:00.

Just north of Big Spring, the land is dominated by cotton, with an occasional field of sunflowers appearing from time to time. The towns along the way all depend on agriculture for their income. The treeless land is green this time of year, with crops in varying stages of maturity. Farm houses dot the land, surrounded by trees forming wind breaks from the punishing winds of the South Plains.

This is the South Plains, and Lubbock is the hub of the South Plains. Look at a map, and you’ll see that all roads in the area seem to lead to Lubbock. Home of Texas Tech University, the city continues to grow and sprawl. Lubbock is a busy town, the financial and commercial hub of the South Plains.

Just north of Lubbock, the landscape begins to change, with corn replacing cotton as the main crop. The interstate skirts small towns – New Deal, Abernathy and Hale Center. We stop in Plainview for gas. In 1980, our daughter Courtney was born in a hospital on the north side of Plainview. I’ve always liked the town. Home of the “Flying Queens” of Wayland Baptist University, the progressive town appears neat and orderly.

We continue heading north. Just south of Tulia, we pull off the interstate into a parking area. Donna had made tuna sandwiches the night before, and we pull these out the fridge for a light lunch. Just a few miles farther on, we turn off the Interstate at Tulia, another neat little town of the southern Panhandle. We head east along Highway 86 and watch as the farmland gives away more and more to ranch land. We pass through the small town of Silverton, where we stop once more for gas. We have plenty of gas for now, but towns in this area are few and far between, and I don’t want to take any chances. In fact, I’m carrying 5 gallons in a container in the back of the truck just to be sure. After all, in the next few weeks we will be passing through some sparsely populated areas.

About 5 or 6 miles west of Quitaque, we descend from the Cap Rock into the broken red sandstone country. The canyon country of this part of Texas is not like the Grand Canyon, which really appears like a furrow plowed in the earth. This is broken country that essentially falls off from an extended mesa. It crumbles from the edge of a table into a rolling country.

Caprock Canyons State Park will be our home for the next 3 days.

Our route from Big Spring to Caprock Canyons SP

Connected Again

It's Saturday, August 25, and we're in Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

For the past week, we've had no Internet and very little cell phone service, but we've had a good time.

Tomorrow, we head to Santa Fe, where we will stay for a week. I should have connectivity while there. That will give me time to post several items about what we've been doing for the past week, so keep checking to see what we've been up to. We've seen some truly fascinating country.

Happy Trails!

Texas RV Park, Big Spring, Texas

Big Spring, Texas, doesn't have much to offer as regards RV parks. After various Internet searches, we decided to stay at Texas RV Park when we came to Big Spring to visit our daughter and her family.

Texas RV Park office. During our 3-night stay, we never found the office open.

On the plus side, the park provides full hookups, and at my site all utilities were grouped together, and that made things very neat and efficient. And that is about where the positive remarks can end.

The majority of the residents at the park appear to be long-term, and several seem to be very long term. These guests have the best sites, of course.

Except for a few sites near the office, most sites are like this -- no shade and no personality.

Upon checking in, the registration clerk told us that new owners had taken over the park in late June. She commented about how the previous owner had let the park run down and had received several citations. We do not see that any improvement has been made by the new owners, but perhaps they have not had enough time to do much. During our stay, though, I saw no maintenance activity, so I'm not sure that anything will change.

We were assigned to site C, an uneven site with absolutely no shade. I had to use 2 boards to level my trailer. The picnic table was placed against a fence; it was old with peeling paint. Weeds and grass had not been trimmed in weeks. Considering that this country gets little rain, it may have been months since the weeds and grass had received any attention.

Our site, site C. The site is long enough to accommodate the longest rigs, but it is not level and there is absolutely no shade.

 

Peeling picnic table and overgrown grass and weeds at our site.

Donna did laundry while here. The facilities were dirty. There is a lock on the door for security purposes, and residents punch in a code to enter. The door would not fully close, so the room could not be locked. So much for security.

This is how I found the "secure" laundry room when I went around the park taking pictures. I do not believe the door is capable of being locked, though residents are provided a code and there is a lock in place.

I investigated the shower/bathroom facilities while at the laundry room, and found them to be in need of care. Although we were given a code for these facilities, there was no lock whatsover on the the men's facilities. A unisex facility had an "out of order" sign on it. The website describes these facilities as "deluxe" restrooms.

Door to the men's restroom. Notice the sign instructs how to use the lock pad; unfortunately, there is no lock pad in place.

When we arrived at 1:30 Wednesday afternoon, the office was closed. A sign on the door provided us with a number to call. The attendant who arrived to check us in told us that the air conditioning had gone out and that the compressor would need to be replaced. During our entire stay, the office was never open.

Cable TV and WiFi are provided to guests. Although there were plenty of channels and the Internet signal was strong, both failed several times during our stay, sometimes staying off for an hour or more at a time.

And all of this is available for a mere daily fee of $37.50. I guess you can charge high prices for bad facilities when there is little competition in the area.

Trip Update: August 18. 2012

Our grandson spent the night with us last night, and our daughter Courtney, her husband Michael, and our grandson Xander joined us for lunch today at Joe's Italian Bistro in Big Spring to celebrate both Michael's and Xander's birthdays. It was good to visit with them; it's hard to leave them. We've gotten used to being nearby for the past year, so it will be strange to not have them close over the next few months.

But tomorrow, we pull out of Big Spring and start the next leg of our journey. All of the tasks we had set for ourselves are behind us now. We've visited Donna's family in Conroe and Livingston, we've visited my brother and his fiance in the Ft. Worth area, we've completed all of our medical appointments, we've taken care of all our financial responsibilities, and we've prepared our truck and trailer for the trip. Our journey really begins tomorrow.

So, I'm counting the start of our trip as beginning in Conroe on July 27, for that is when we began living in our trailer. I'm tracking our mileage and costs from that point and want to share that information since others may be interested in knowing what a trip like this costs. Keep in mind that I am only tracking gas and campsite (or lodging) costs, not food or anything else. I'm also not tracking gasoline spent on side trips -- only gasoline used to pull the trailer from one location to another. So far, here is what we have done:



The spreadsheet above is a screen shot and may be difficult to read. If so, I'll look at some way to improve this. For now, you can see that the total gas cost is $244.10 for 590 miles. When pulling the trailer, we have been averaging between 9.5 mpg and 11.6 mpg, depending on terrain, weather, and other conditions. Total lodging cost thus far is $424.75. Total overall cost is $668.85 giving us a per day cost of $41.80.

You might also be interested in what we are paying for gas as we travel across the state and, later, the country. Here is a spreadsheet screen shot of that information.



This averages to $3.508 per gallon.

Internet connectivity has been spotty thus far. Places that advertise WiFi often don't deliver, and other places that don't advertise it surprise us with good connectivity. So, if no new items appear for 3 days or more on the blog, please assume that we are just in an area where we can't connect. When we do finally connect, I'll probably post several items at once as I've done over the past 2 days.

From Big Spring, we visit Caprock Canyons State Park and Palo Duro State Park, both in the Texas Panhandle. When we leave Palo Duro, we head out of Texas. This is where things get interesting for us, for we are about to go to places where we have never been before or have not been but once or twice.

I hope you enjoy the trip.

Return to Spring Creek

While our house was being built last year, Donna and I spent almost 6 weeks at Spring Creek Marina and RV Park. I documented our time there in various blog entries. These are listed below for your convenience.

• Spring Creek Marina and RV Park
• Life at Spring Creek RV Park
• The Worst of Humanity
• The Good Things at Spring Creek

My opinion of the place has not changed much in the past year; if anything, I care less for the place now than before.

Unfortunately, San Angelo does not have many facilities for RVers. The state park has practically no shade and no full hookups; the KOA has little shade, and sites are very close together there. There are other RV parks, but they don't even measure up to these. So, when we returned to San Angelo to clean up some loose ends there, we really had no choice except to stay at Spring Creek.

Donna did enjoy fishing at the RV park, and she had quite a bit of luck on one day. And the park does offer grass and some shade in the form of large mesquite trees, and it does provide cable TV and full hookups. That is about where the good things end, though.

The park claims to offer WiFi. At site #44, where we spent 4 nights, we were unable to connect to the Internet. The signal simply was not strong enough. I could connect to the Spring Creek network, but it was a local connection only. I called twice about this. Basically, the last time the gentleman answering my call simply said, "There's nothing I can do." Well, he could get someone out there to fix the problem. He even suggested the problem might be mine. Funny, I was able to go to Starbucks and connect with no problem, and I was also able to park in front of the Spring Creek office and connect fine. The problem is a weak signal along the perimeters of the park, and the management is unwilling to do anything about it.

The "anything goes" attitude is still prevalent among residents at the park. You can hear noise all night long. One night, I was awakened by music and laughter at 2:17 AM, and both continued for about an hour.

I'll not stay at this place again; I'd rather be in a cramped site at the KOA where I know I'm at least getting what I pay for.

Good Eats: Hollywood and Vine, Glen Rose, Texas

Following our hike at Dinosaur Valley State Park on Saturday, August 11, our little group of explorers was pretty hungry. I had previously researched some eating places in Glen Rose, and Donna and I decided to give Hollywood and Vine a try.

Located in downtown Glen Rose about a block off the square, Hollywood and Vine offers casual dining in a remodeled boarding house built about a century ago.

I should begin by saying the restaurant has no air-conditioning. However, there is a steady movement of air through the building caused by numerous fans, and there is outside dining on the shady patio. I did not find the environment to be uncomfortable.

Donna had nachos, Nancy had a burger, and Larry and I had chicken fried steaks. My meal was good. The steak was tender with a good crust, and I was able to cut it with a fork. Gravy was tasty as well, and the beans were also good. I did not care for the mashed potatoes, though, because they included skins. This is a personal preference as I simply do not care for the texture of mashed potatoes with skins; I prefer light and fluffy mashed potatoes. Rather than beans, my brother opted for fried okra.

The best part of the meal might have been the iced-tea. It was strong and tasted as if it had been sun-brewed.

I did not try any of Donna’s nachos, but she did not care for them very much. In fact, Donna's experience at the restaurant left something to be desired. When we ordered our drinks, Donna asked, "What do you have on draft?" to which the young waitress replied, "I don't know." Donna followed this up by asking, "Do you have Bud Light?" The waitress responded that they did.

In a few minutes, she returned with our drinks, including a bottle of Bud Light. We quizzed her a bit on this, and she finally said something about the draft dispenser being broken, and we just let it go at that. She redeemed herself, though, by keeping our tea glasses full, and she ended up being a pretty attentive waitress.

Although I might not be able to get Donna to return to Hollywood and Vine, I would give it another try if we were in the neighborhood.