Texas - Day 102 - racing the snow to Dallas/Ft. Worth

Cedar Hill State Park, Cedar Hill

Saturday, 13 February 2021

I'm guessing that Martin Creek Lake State Park caters primarily to people who want to fish.  They have 60 RV sites, but also a couple dozen cabins and screened-in shelters.  They have 2 boat launches, a fishing pier and a fish-cleaning station.  There's also a bridge to a small island, where they have hiking and biking trails.  I thought I read somewhere that they allow tent camping there too, but it's not shown on the park map.

Out of all these spaces, there were only 8 campers last night (including us) plus 2 camp hosts.  The lack of competition made it much easier for me to walk the dogs farther than I'd have been able to if there'd been more people.

There were a lot of birds, though, and I saw a nuthatch, a woodpecker and a kingfisher without even trying.  And as I was leaving the park, I saw a roadrunner.

Oddly, there was also an enormous power plant just across the lake that made such a loud humming sound the park had signs telling people the hum was coming from that plant.  That plant, though, keeps the water warm year round, per the park, which allows year round fishing for 8 species, including bass, catfish and sunfish.

I don't think I'd be happy at this campground at all with more people, because it's not laid out to make walking my dogs very easy, but the weather was definitely on my side this time.

today's route

David thought with the chance of ice on the roads I'd be better off sticking to the interstate, because I could get to I-20 fairly easily at Longview, and then take it all the way across to within a few miles of tonight's campground.  He pointed out that road maintenance was always done first on the interstates, and only afterward on the smaller Texas and US highways.

I agree with all that, but my experience is that people are more likely to travel at high speeds on interstates, making them more vulnerable to a spin-out on an icy patch.  And since I'm not comfortable going at those speeds even when the road conditions are good, I might provide even more of a hazard for other traffic than usual.  Besides, I'm just more comfortable on the smaller roads and like the scenery better.  So, for better or worse, I picked the roads less traveled.

To Longview

My first move, though was to head north to Longview because I wanted to fill up with propane before hunkering down in the snow.  I'd found a U-Haul online in Longview that sold propane and decided to get it here, rather than wait until I got to Cedar Hill, thinking the weather might be bad by then.

Except when I got to the U-Haul, the owner told me he had only 1 employee who was state-certified to pump propane, and that employee was at a different location for the day.  So I had a 45-minute drive up there for nothing.  And from there, it took me another 45 minutes to get back down to the road I wanted to take west.  That added a lot of time and energy and some anxiety to my driving today, but it's my own fault for not calling ahead before I left the campground.

Back on the road

Today's drive took me through all kinds of places, from large cities to tiny communities.  Longview was the largest, with 80,456 residents.  From there I went through Kilgore, pop. 12,975.  I visited both towns when I was here a few months ago.

I passed through places I'd never heard of, like Pirtle Community (that's what the sign said, though the internet just calls it Pirtle), which once (170 years ago) had the biggest race track in Rusk County (how's that for a mark on history?); Pitner Junction, a farming community that may have as many as 20 residents now; and New Summerfield, pop. 1,111, a crossroads town with an economy that relies on greenhouses, Christmas tree farms and ranches.

By the time we got to Jacksonville, pop. 14,550, we were all ready for a break, and I found an empty parking lot downtown where I could walk the dogs.  That was when I realized what I'd been looking at during the drive: all the trees were coated with ice, and branches and leaves and berries were all dripping with it.  

As a side note, the town was named for 2 Jacksons: Jackson Smith, who owned the land the town was built on, and Dr. William Jackson, who was one of the first to build a house in the new town.  And another oddity: in the late 1800s, Jacksonville was a leading peach producer, but in the first half of the 1900s they switched to tomatoes and called the town "the tomato capital of the world."  (Texans have a long history of exaggeration.)

It's lucky I took a look at the map and my directions when I stopped, because otherwise I'd have taken off on the road north to Tyler and I-20, instead of northwest on US 175, which is where I wanted to go.

I continued to pass through places I'd never heard of: Reese, named for a railroad conductor and with a possible population of 75; Cuney, pop. 145, that was for many years the only place in the county that allowed alcohol sales, a situation that didn't even begin to change until 2009 (Texans are nothing if not stubborn); Frankston, pop. 1,229, named unusually for a woman - Miss Frankie Miller who donated land for a municipal park; and Poynor, pop. 305, named for a railroad surveyor (see a pattern?), but the post office called it Poyner for nearly 20 years before someone finally corrected it.

By the time I got to Athens, I'd begun to feel more secure about the driving conditions.  Every bridge I came to had been sanded, I saw no signs anywhere along the road that other drivers had run into ice, and all the other drivers seemed to be driving sensibly for the conditions.  The traffic in the DFW area increased substantially, of course, but by then I'd come to I-20 and skirted the main part of town to get to Cedar Hill.

There I stopped for groceries and for propane, and then went on to the state park to check in a day early.

When I got to the campsite I've always used before, though, I came to a situation I hadn't expected and didn't want.  My site, #77, backs up to site #2, with no bushes or anything to separate the 2 spaces.  A great situation if you're camping with friends, but of course I never have been.  In the past, it's been an advantage because the park wasn't allowing any of the sites from #1 - #21 to be rented, presumably because of limiting capacity for the virus.  I'd always been able to take my dogs through that campsite over to what had been an unpopulated road so we could walk without meeting other dogs.

Today I discovered #2 was very completely occupied with a very large trailer and a campsite full of personal belongings, almost as if we were in a trailer park instead of a campground.  Though an eyesore, I could ignore it because my back was to it - but I couldn't ignore the 2 large dogs they owned and had outside for hours at a time.  Now we were running into other dogs any time we turned around.  I was seriously disappointed, but with the coming snow I didn't want to try to change things now.

Besides that, I'd been dealing all day with another problem, which was some serious physical disturbance.  Since first thing this morning, I'd been feeling queasy and having mild bouts with diarrhea, not to mention some odd aches in my arms and legs.  It finally occurred to me maybe I should check for the symptoms of COVID.  Now that I was not having to worry about moving us half across the state in ominous weather, I did check and found that, aside from not having respiratory symptoms (other than my usual asthma) or loss of smell/taste, I had all the other symptoms.  Not news I wanted.