Camping in Texas

If you've been following my Texas posts, and considering a trip to the Lone Star State,  here's one on the ins and outs of Texas camping, specifically camping in the Big Bend, Hill Country and Panhandle.

Unlike Arizona and most of the Rocky Mountain West, Texas is short on public lands.  Although there is plenty of wide open space, it's not "this land is your land, this land is my land"space, space you can use for hiking and camping.  On the Federal front, in the western half of the state, the half we visited, there's Big Bend National Park, Guadalupe Mountains National Park, and the Amistad National Recreation Area.  No National Forests. No BLM land.  The AAA map tells me there's also the Rita Blanca National Grassland in the northwest corner of the Panhandle and Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge, just west of our present location in Palo Duro Canyon State Park.

In the last 3+ years with the van, our default style of camping has been National Forest, National Park and BLM campgrounds. These are reasonably priced, and practically free with the America the Beautiful Senior Pass (if you're 62 or older, $10 gets you free admission/parking and half price camping for life).  In west Texas, with one big exception, our pass didn't do much for us.

The exception is Big Bend National Park.  Three great campgrounds, each $7/night with the pass, plus a great backcountry option we'll use next time we're here.  For one $10 fee ($5 with the geezer pass) you can spend up to 14 nights in designated primitive sites, many of them on decent dirt roads.

So what's a camper to do?  Two options, one free, one a little more costly than we're used to.  As a side note, when we visited cities like San Antonio and Austin, we stayed in hotels and motels, and used the van to get around.

In Texas, you can stay overnight for free at picnic areas. Since Texas highways are lousy with picnic areas, this is a good option for folks on a tight budget.  Although we made a lot of lunch time stops at picnic areas, we never used them for camping. Texas picnic areas consist of several picnic tables and trash cans, generally in a grassy area, and right by the highway.  When we camp, we're generally looking for distance from road noise, places to walk with Toby, water, and a toilet.  If we find a nice spots for boondocking (dry camping, remote camping, primitive camping, dispersed camping), we're happy to forgo the water and toilet.  Picnic areas didn't do it for us.

We quickly realized Texas State Parks were the way to go.  These parks were mostly constructed by the CCC, and are all over the state, generally in scenic areas.  State parks offer water, restrooms, hot showers, and hiking, and with the exception of Big Bend Ranch State Park, dogs are welcome on the trails. The only drawback is cost. Overnight camping fees vary from park to park, and range from $8/night for primitive sites to $24/night for sites with full hookups.  It's been a mostly cold trip, with many nights in the teens and low twenties, so we've mostly opted for water and electric sites, at an average cost of $15/night.  In an electric site, we can plug in our extension cord, then run the refrigerator and furnace, and recharge stuff, all without draining the "house" battery.   Many state parks also offer decent WiFi in the water/electric camping areas.

Although not as big or remote as what we're used to, the Texas State Parks have all been good places to spend the night, well-maintained, and generally staffed with welcoming and helpful volunteers and rangers.  The one exception is Palo Duro Canyon, easily the most spectacular of the parks, and also the least welcoming and most poorly maintained. Perhaps it's the proximity to a city, in this case, Amarillo.

If you visit Texas and think you'll visit more than half a dozen state parks, natural areas and historic sites, consider a Texas State Parks pass. It's $70 for a year, and gets everyone in your vehicle into these parks for "free." Since admission to Texas Parks and Wildlife sites ranges from $2-6 per person per day, this in addition to any camping fees, it's a better deal than you might think.  The pass also includes four half price nights when you're in the same site for two nights. The pass expires at the end of the month in which it was purchased, so ours is good through February 2017.

Of the parks we stayed in, we particularly liked Copper Breaks, Caprock Canyons, Seminole Canyon and Davis Mountains.  We also visited and loved Pedernales Falls, Enchanted Rock (this park has all walk-in sites) and Colorado Bend State Parks.

Another side note- more of west Texas than we expected has no Verizon signal.  Not a problem, and it's good to be prepared with paper maps, books, magazines, etc.  We're also doing a three-month $0.99/month trial of Spotify, and enjoyed listening to albums we had downloaded and saved offline.

We found the state parks pretty empty, and hear that changes dramatically with Spring Break in March. Even in winter, Friday and Saturday nights within a couple of hours of cities like San Antonio and Austin may be booked way in advance at more popular parks. 

The good news is Texas has a good park reservation site, and unlike Recreation.gov and the Arizona State Parks site, no additional reservation fee.
http://texas.reserveworld.com/Home.aspx

If you camp Texas and find more options, let me know!

Toni

The photos are of our camps in Chisos Basin (Big Bend National Park) and Comanche Loop (Copper Breaks State Park).

Postcard from Nova Scotia

Friday, September 25

This comes to you from Lincolnshire (Chicago area), home of Mary's brother Dick, where we are enjoying a brief layover on our flight home from Nova Scotia.  Although those of you on Facebook will already have seen the photos from White Head Island, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, for us, this trip was not about dramatic coastlines and picturesque fishing villages.

Our trips often develop in unanticipated theme.  Largely because we were listening to Mary Doria Russell's books "Doc" and "Epitaph," our spring van ramble through Oregon and northern California acquired an 1870's focus.

This trip turned out to be about migration, and its corollaries immigration and deportation.  We absorbed the 1755 deportation of the Acadians (many migrated to Louisiana where they developed what we know as Cajun culture), the immigration of the New England Planters who replaced them, the immigration of the Scottish highlanders, the British Loyalists (including Black Loyalists), and finally, the millions of soon-to-be Canadians who flowed through Halifax's Pier 21 during the 20th century. Our understanding was informed by this trip's audiobook, Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration."  

We don't learn much about Canada in U.S. schools, and historic sites don't always give the big picture. Until we visited the Fortress of Louisbourg, it was a blur of French in charge, then British, then French, then British. At Louisbourg, in the course of a one-hour walking tour of the 1740's fortress (at that time, the largest fortification in North America, defending the third busiest port on the Atlantic coast), we were finally able to put it all in the context of vaguely familiar European century of imperialist conflict between England, France and Spain, that included the French and Indian Wars, the War of Spanish Succession, the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the War of 1812.  Not unlike today's Syrians, the peoples living in Nova Scotia and on Cape Breton, from the Mi'kmaq on, were displaced by these wars, with often disastrous results.

It wasn't all history.  We had two wonderful visits with friends- John & Brenda Blom on White Head Island (New Brunswick) and Bob & Janice Girard at Lake Annis (near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia).  There's something particularly invigorating about days of intense hanging-out with folks who like good conversation, food and drink.

Speaking of food, we ate amazing amounts of very fresh seafood, particularly haddock and scallops, but also mussels, cod, tuna, halibut, and bits of lobster and crab served in endlessly appetizing ways.  Most unusual were the lobster pirogues served as part of our five-course tasting menu at the The Bite House, just outside Baddeck. 

In addition to food, we sampled local wines, beers, and single malt whiskey, enjoyed Cape Breton music from ceilidhs (a "kay lee" is a sort of Scottish music jam) to Men of the Deeps, North America's only coal miners chorus.  Although Mary did see a few new-to-her birds, we were too late for fall migration (and too early for fall colors). Oh yeah, we rode on a LOT of ferries, on rides varying in length from five minutes to 2 1/2 hours.  We were, after all, in the Maritime Provinces.

On our last full day in Nova Scotia, at Pier 21 (Canada's Immigration Museum), the Family History Center provided printouts of my parents' immigration records from 1939 (Papa) and January 1940 (Mama), as well as information about the ships they came in on- the Georgic (Mama) and the Ils de France (Papa).  For me, a moving conclusion to a visit during which we talked so much about the migration of people from one place to another.

Home tomorrow. Still lots to ponder.

Toni

Pictures- (1) Getting ready for lobster season on White Head Island, (2) John and Mary at Southwest Head, Grand Manan, (3) the beach at Kejimkujik Seaside, (4) Bob & Mary, followed by Janice and Bob's sister Phyllis on Mavillette Beach (French Shore near Yarmouth), (5) the Lunenburg Academy, (6) little toad at Uisge Bahn Falls near Baddeck, (7) view south towards Cheticamp, (8) another coastal shot, this time along the Lighthouse Trail outside Louisbourg, (9) the Skyline Trail in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, (10) sunset from our B&B in Cheticamp, (11) the beach at Inverness, (12) the White Head Ferry from John & Brenda's deck, (13) a carnivorous pitcher plant at Keji Seaside, (14) harbor seals at Keji

The limitations of posting to Blogger from a mobile phone mean the photos are low resolution and the layout nonexistent.

Throwback Thursday Trip Reports- Cuba- Santiago de Cuba- May 22, 2011

We are almost in a different country.  More tropical, more laid back, more color, seemingly less dilapidated infrastructure.  Lovely.  Saturday began with the flight from Havana to Santiago in an old Soviet plane.  Uneventful except for the steam that rose from the floor as we gathered speed for takeoff.  Apparently totally normal for Soviet planes (something to do with how the AC works), and a bit of a shock as it looked a lot like smoke.   Santiago is on the coast, in the south and east of Cuba, almost as close to Haiti as Havana is to Cuba. In Santiago we have four or five cars and their drivers, plus Oscar and Raul.  All greet us at the airport.  Oscar and Raul are very involved with the culture and history of Santiago and the Caribbean, and we learned a lot over the course of the day.  Santiago is the second oldest city in Cuba, founded in 1511.  They are proud to be the "cradle of independence," first for the was of independence from Spain, and later for the revolution.  The beautiful mountains around the city are the sierras where Fidel et al hung out between 1953 and 1959.  Son  and bolero originate in Santiago, and this weekend is the conclusion of Cuba Disco, something like the Cuban Grammies.

After checking into our Soviet-era hotel, we went to El Morro a huge 1630 fort on a hill overlooking the ocean and the bay. First lunch on a terrace overlooking the ocean, then (for those of us still standing- remember we left the hotel at 4:30 a.m.), a tour of the fort.   At the end of the war of independence (1898), the American fleet picked off the Spanish fleet one by one as they came out of the Santiago harbor.  This and the history of piracy are explained in the museum within the walls of the fort.  Back to the hotel for a quick shower, then we walk to Casa de Caribe for a special performance (just for us) of Orfeum, a truly spectacular choir.  As we walked in, they were lined up singing on both sides of the entrance hall.  A total surprise, and so beautiful Mary and I were both in tears.  Even as I write, it happens again.
After the concert we learn about Casa de Caribe.  Raul is an anthropologist and does his work here.  It's a center for the study of the Caribbean, with a particular focus on African culture and history.  Then we walk on to San Juan Hill.   On the way, I used my not so good Spanish to tell Raul about Buckey O'Neil and the Prescott connection to San Juan Hill.  Raul announces that Antonia is moved to be at San Juan Hill, where the Mayor of her City gave his life for the cause of Cuban independence from Spain, and as it turns out, I am.  We find Buckey's name on the plaques listing the fallen, and wonder if this might be the first visit from Prescott in over 50 years.

Dinner in a rooftop palador, a long walk through the street festival that is part of Cuba Disco, then we fall into bed, ready I hope for today.  First a dance lesson (yikes!), later music and more music.

I love it here.

Toni

Throwback Thursday Trip Reports- Cuba- Santiago de Cuba- Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Much has happened since last we spoke.  In fact it feels like weeks since we first met up in Miami.   Sunday started with the dance lesson- salsa and son, although to be frank, I didn't notice when we switched.  Perhaps that's the point where it started to seem I truly do have two left feet.  The count for both is 1-2-3 5--6-7, and I was doing well (for me) on the basics, up through alone, together, open, closed, turn.  Then they added changing sides and it all fell apart.  Oh well.  The dance lesson was in a part of Santiago where many French Haitians settled after the Haitian revolution around 1800.  We passed by a police station that was attacked by revolutionaries in 1956 to distract authorities from Fidel's landing in the Grama, and also by the oldest house in Cuba, slept in (if I heard right) by Cortes on his way to Mexico and DeSoto on his way to Florida.  After lunch at another rooftop palador where we are the first guests from the United States, on to a performance of Tomba Francaise.  This comes from slave times in Cuba and combines African drums and rhythms with French planter dress and even a maypole dance.  There are only three tomba francaise societies left.  Wonderful, and you'll have to wait for the photos.

Speaking of photos, my camera is down for the count (rain!), and its possible there will be none after yesterday afternoon.  Yesterday we drove to Palma, a vilage 45 minutes from Santiago.  Shared the highway with horses, ox carts, bicycles, and eventually arrived at a small house where we sat for a while as the saint spoke with Ariana.  Yes, this was the home of a voodoo priest and the rest of the morning was spent in and out of the temple (a very small windowless shed) in the backyard (think barnyard) of the home.  The ceremony had something to do with healing and involved anointing with some aromatic oil, candles, ashes, much ritual and ceremonial drinking of rum mixed with herbs, from bottles that had been buried in the ground.  An old priest with the feel of the Dalai Lama and a younger priest who seemed to be possessed by the saints.  Or maybe it was something else entirely.    As we take our leave of the saint, at one point the older priest is smoking a pipe with the bowl in his mouth and the younger is pouring rum in his ears. Hot and overwhelming, yet also benign and tranquil.  Not at all scary or creepy.

At one point most of us sat in the barnyard and learned a bit about what this group was doing.  It involves turning 45 hectares of land into an agricultural center in harmony with the teachings of voodoo. It is at the confluence of two rivers. There is a beautiful design that will theoretically be visible from the air sometime in the future.  After lunch we hiked to the land to plant avocado seedlings.  The land at present is a mile from any road, and you need to cross one of the rivers before climbing up on the mesa.  So far it has been cleared and a rough lean-to erected.  Much time is spent using a measuring tape to decide where our seedlings will go.  as this is happening it begins to rain, first a drizzle, then a major downpour with thunder and lightning, all of which is crashing and flashing very close.    General joy among the Cubans, as this is the first rain in a long time, the earth is very dry, and until now, any water has been hauled up by hand. Plus it is an indication that the ceremony has gone well.  A blessing.  Mixed reactions from our group.

Inches of rain continue to fall (hence the now useless camera) and we eventually make our way off the hill, slipping and sliding down the now extremely muddy trail.  At some point, several young boys greet us with great excitement.  I hear ariba and am sure a flash flood is coming, as it surely would in Arizona.  Once they slow down I realize they are saying they have helped the man with the beard and glasses across the river and up.  They help us as well, and we are eventually back across the now waist deep river and making a dripping parade through town.  Definitely a source of entertainment for the locals.  Back at the house we drip on the porch until one of the guys returns with a selection of dry clothes.  Amazing generosity.  We return to the hotel looking like campesinos, and are warmly greeted by the hotel staff. 

Actually we return minus Ariana and Debbie, who have stayed for a last-minute offering of fire eating and breaking of glass on tongues that Ariana promises will be truly amazing, largely thanks to the obvious success of the day's ceremony.  They guys have come "down from the mountains" to perform for us.  Tempting and it has already been a very full day, and showers and dinner call.  Photographer Debbie will have photos.

Today will be more pedestrian. Artists studios at 10 a.m.

Toni

MT Retirement Road Trip- Week 2- June 23, 2013

Week 2 took us from Sebastopol CA to Grants Pass OR, via Mendocino, many redwood parks, the "Lost Coast," and bits of the southern Oregon coast. It included many long, steep, winding trips back and forth across various coastal ranges. We've now followed the redwoods through their current range (Big Sur to southern Oregon). We've been practicing a 21st century version of "living off the land," sourcing our food and drink locally as much as possible. This has included wineries, microbreweries, a wood-fired brandy distillery (!), farmers markets and natural food stores, and a gift of fresh-caught salmon and perch. The week was dominated by a for-us off-screen event, the Granite Mountain (aka Doce) fire in Prescott. Although my sister's and parents' neighborhoods were evacuated, no homes burned, and last night Niki and Steve were finally able to go home. We're now heading for the Appegate Valley, where we hope to refill our empty wine "cellar."

Week 2 Photos

MT Retirement Road Trip- We are in British Columbia!- July 22, 2013

Spent last night on the bank of Johnstone Creek. Sleeping in the van, it sounded like we were over the creek. On towards Nelson today.

Border crossing/customs much simpler than we had been told. Three questions. Alcohol? Tobacco? Firearms? The guard was more interested in our relationship (How do you know each other? We're married.) than in Toby.

While in Canada, we'll only be doing email and Facebook when we have WiFi, as we do now at a coffee place in Greenwood, home of "the world's best municipal water." It won a prize. Will sample soon.

Expecting to spend the next week or two exploring the Kootenay Rockies.

At this moment, I could continue on the road forever. Life is good. 

Love, Toni

P.S. Photo is of Blue Lake in the Northern Cascades. Loved that area and the Methow Valley.

MT Retirement Road Trip- Where in the world are Toni & Mary?, or Whatever happened to Road Trip Week 5?- July 16, 2013

We find ourselves on the bank of the Hoh River. A doe and two fawns just swam across. Last night it was an elk. Reluctantly preparing to depart for Neah Bay and Cape Flattery, northwestern-most point in the lower 48.

Wonderful 10 days with no opportunity to work with photos. Just smartphone posts to Facebook. May attach photo of our current camp (with elk) here. Portland, Mt Saint Helens, Olympia, Duckabush, Hoh Rain Forest. "Wow!"  is becoming an overused expression.

Hope to be in B.C. by Sunday, meaning communications will depend on public WiFi. I may go into smartphone withdrawal. Should emerge in Montana sometime in early August.

Weather has been spectacular, and I think our NW friends would rather we kept that a secret.

Love to all, Toni