Texas - Day 58 - to Cedar Hill

Cedar Hill State Park, Cedar Hill

Wednesday, 30 December 2020

today's route

On the road

Lily and I both noticed how very much quieter it was when the dogs were elsewhere.  It was certainly nice but my own feeling is that while a little aggravation may not be great for the blood pressure, it is a jolt of life and keeps me from being a complete slug.  So I picked up the puppies from their boarding place and down the road we went.  Or up the road, I guess, since we were going north.

I've driven I-35 from Austin to Dallas for many many years, and I found it a little comforting that all the same towns and cities are where they used to be.  Only many of them are much larger, like Georgetown, that had only 5,000 residents when I attended Southwestern University there in the late '60s but now has coming up on 80,000.  It's the 7th fastest growing city in the country.

When I passed through Belton, I noticed that the Bell County Expo Center was hosting the "ABBA Winter Classic and New Years Show."  That sounded to me like they were going to have some sort of party with music by ABBA, but that doesn't seem to be correct.  I still don't know what ABBA stands for, but the Expo Center says it falls under the category of "Animal/Equestrian/Livestock," which doesn't sound much like a Swedish musical group.

A cold front came through when we were in the Belton/Temple area, at almost exactly the time it was forecast.  As far as I was concerned, it meant strong rain and very strong wind, making driving in heavy traffic much more difficult.

Coming into Temple, I crossed the Leon River and saw on the right the property named Bend O' the River, in letters on a huge horseshoe-shaped gateway.  It's been there all my life, I think, but I now find that the property has been donated to the City of Temple.

The big change in Temple is that there's no longer any work on the highway through town.  There's been work on that stretch of highway since at least the mid-60s, by my certain memory, and now there's just a finished highway.  I was always certain the roadwork was being done by a company owned by someone with a brother high up in government.

Then I discovered the awfulness of highway construction had only been moved down the road to Waco.  As it once did in Temple, the traffic obstruction near Baylor goes on for miles of narrowed lanes and fewer lanes and shoulders blocked by concrete barriers and curves around torn-up roads and equipment - ugh.  Especially in the high winds and wet roads and heavy traffic.

I passed a huge billboard that said, "God Bless President Trump."

Past Hillsboro, I took the I-35E route, where the interstate branched into east (through Dallas) and west (through Ft. Worth) pieces.  Then I ran into more highway work and came extremely close to being hit by the trailer of a semi.  With this highway work zone came curves and narrow lanes and strong wind gusts, and none of the traffic slowed down for any of it.  Including this semi that let his trailer veer so much into my lane that I had to step on the brake to keep from being hit.  That really shook me.

Cedar Hill is only in the DFW Metroplex, as they call this area.  The town of Cedar Hill is in the far southwest corner of Dallas County but is actually closer to Ft. Worth than to Dallas.  This meant that just past Waxahachie I took US 287 to the northwest, then US 67 north to the farm-to-market road that runs right past the state park, where we had reservations for the next several nights.

A coyote sauntered past our campsite soon after we got here, reminding me that though there aren't any deer in this state park, there are plenty of coyotes.