Texas - Days 85 - 88 - chores and errands in Travis County

Northwest Austin KOA, Leander

Wednesday, 27 through Saturday, 30 January 2021

This was a fairly action-packed period, in a low-key way.

Campground

Here at the campground, I hired a man to clean my poor little RV of months of accumulated bugs and other crud.  Its last serious bath was in Grand Junction, CO, so it was way overdue.

I did 3 loads of laundry, more than half of which was the dog bed covers.  Luckily for me, I didn't see the sign in the laundry room that said absolutely no pet bedding until I'd already started my washers.  But since I'd thrown my own clothes in the washers with them, I figured that made them more like regular laundry, and I cleaned up the hair that appeared on the machines.

I took a shower and cleaned the RV's bathroom and cleaned the microwave and defrosted the freezer (how can dog hair get in the freezer?) - just the general chores I find it harder to do when the dogs are taking up so much room and energy.

It took most of one day but I got reservations made for where we'll go when we leave here, up until February 10th.  I've still got a lot of Texas I want to see, but the area where I'm going - the coast and the Valley - have very few state parks and even fewer KOAs.  In addition, the coast is where folks from up north want to go, so the state parks are mostly full.  And in addition in addition, the Valley is reported to be a serious hot spot for the virus.  Laredo, for instance, has one of the highest rates of illness in the state.  I'll just have to play it by ear and try not to feel like I need to rush this because I have a deadline.

One evening I ordered a pizza and ate half of it while I watched Knives Out, which is becoming one of my favorite dopey movies.  It's too cleverly constructed to be really dopey, but it still ranks up there.

I spent a morning realizing I'd made a serious mistake by neglecting my financial situation.  I've got enough money, but I haven't been sending that money to places like the RV insurance company.  As a result, my vehicle insurance has lapsed.  Never mind that I've been driving for several weeks without it, that was when I didn't know.  I couldn't possibly move an inch, now that I knew, until I got coverage reinstated.  That took a while, but my great brokers got it set up eventually, so I was back in business.

I got several blog posts done and am now caught up, except for some very old posts that I still haven't finished - like the one about the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum.  

Not campground

I drove into Austin one morning, to get the crown measured and made and attached.  That took almost 3½ hours and half my mouth was still under the influence of anesthesia by suppertime, which was weird.

It's been a month since I got that root canal job done and, though Dr. RC (Root Canal) said the infection in my mouth would drain away by now, it hadn't.  The dentist told me to call Dr. RC, which I did, and he told me to take an antibiotic, which I hate to do.  I know some people think the more the merrier with antibiotics, but I figure we've got a lot of important and good biotics in our bodies that I don't want to disrupt unless I absolutely have to.  But infection in my mouth ranks up there in the absolutely-have-to category.  

On the plus side, I was pleased to note that with Amoxicillin, which is what he'd prescribed for me, I didn't have to give up alcohol, like I've had to do with antibiotics in the past.  A pandemic and an uncertain future is not my idea of a good time to give up alcohol unless said alcohol is causing more problems than it's easing.

I stopped on the way back at an oil change place, because that was something else I hadn't gotten done on time.  My poor little RV got drained of your basic sludge, and I hope it'll be much happier now that it's got nice fresh fluids in it.  It's also got a new air filter and more brake fluid, and God's in his heaven, all's right with the world.  (Or something like that.)

When I picked up my mail, I got my $600 stimulus check, so I stopped at a Chase bank and deposited that and traded a thick stack of $1 bills for larger denominations (and that was a mind trick, trying to remind myself that I had just as much money after as before, that the thick stack of $1s weren't worth more than the thin stack of $20s).

And in general

I've missed having the dogs here, but it's almost like the kind of missing when a headache goes away.  Thank goodness I never had kids - so much harder than with dogs to dump them someplace when you need a break for a few days.  I love both my dogs and wouldn't want to do this trip without them, but they do make me tired sometimes, and lately lots of things seem to make me tired.  

I really do wish our country could start governing itself like there were grown-ups in charge again, like we've had at times in our past.  On the other hand, we somehow made it through the madness of the McCarthy Red Scare, and the insanity of a Civil War, and the inhumanity of the Japanese-American internment camps, and I believe - I really believe - that George Floyd's horrific death changed things in this country in a way that nothing else has managed to do and that we're finally finally taking our first halting steps toward a brighter day.  There's much to cause feelings of despair, and I have those feelings.  But I see many signs of hope, too, and I'm clinging to those.

Texas - Day 84 - to Austin

Leander KOA, Leander
Tuesday, 26 January 2021

I'm not bothering with a route map for this trip because I've driven this same route several times before - most recently just a couple of weeks ago.  I went down I-35W until it joined with I-35E and became just plain I-35, and took that straight down to Austin.  It took me exactly 3 hours and 40 minutes to drive from the campground to Hancock Center at 40th St and Red River in Austin.  And that was with me going only 65 mph the whole way, despite the higher speed limits.  So that's good to know.  (Wonder if I'll remember.)

There wasn't anything particularly memorable about this drive, other than the large number of police out on the highway watching for bad driving.  You'd think this was a weekend or a national holiday, there were so many of them out.

At Bruceville-Eddy, I saw enormous fields of a bright emerald green, which were clearly a crop of some kind.  The contrast was sharp with the brown-green fields everywhere else. 

I remember Bruceville and Eddy as separate towns when I was young, and I hadn't realized they'd merged, so I looked it up.  I learned the merger happened in 1974, after I got out of college but was still being oblivious to the world around me, like so many other 20-somethings tend to do.  Unusually, each of these towns retained their separate post offices until Bruceville's developed unsafe foundation problems in 2009, and then they merged those too.

I saw a bumper sticker that said "Make America Kind Again."

In Austin, I took the puppies by Hyde Park Animal Clinic for their 2nd shots of the canine influenza vaccine, and I hope it actually works.

Then we stopped to walk a bit and have lunch, and then I dropped them off at Taurus Academy.  And I hope they have a wonderful time barking at other dogs for several days.

From there I drove the 15 or 20 miles to the Leander KOA and instantly started cleaning up doggy detritus.  I pulled the covers off their beds and took all the beds outside to air on the picnic table.  Then I swept the mounds of dog hair off the floor, twice, because one go-round doesn't get it all up.

I did some rearranging of supplies and just generally took advantage of the lowered energy level and lack of need to walk the dogs every 3 or 4 hours to get some things done around the RV.

Texas - Days 75 - 83 - in and around Cedar Hill

Cedar Hill State Park, Cedar Hill

Sunday, 17 through Monday, 25 January 2021

Life in the campground

Weather

During this period we had a fair amount of sun, but we also had some very heavy rains now and then.  Considering the drought this area's been in for a long time, it was surprising for us to have so much precipitation during this time.

I've been noticing, when I take the dogs out for their early walks, that it's rarely truly dark in the campground, thanks to the lights from the combined Dallas/Ft. Worth metropolitan area.  It hasn't caused me trouble sleeping, because our particular campsite is heavily shaded by trees, but as soon as we get out on the road to walk, we all notice that we can notice things.

This was really apparent because on several mornings toward the end of our stay we had heavy fog, with the morning TV weather report saying visibility was down to just a few miles in this area.  That fog stopped most of the light from coming in, so walking here became more like our experience in more remote campgrounds.

People

The campground was completely full on Saturday night, and scarcely less so on Sunday night.  After the 3-day holiday weekend, things went back to normal, with a fair number of campers on weekends and almost none on weekdays.

One group, at the end of the section of park where we were, seemed to be making theirs a long-term stay.  They came in right about the time I first did and, except for one night when they were gone, they've been there ever since.  I noticed them particularly because they were in tents.  Their group started out with 1 car, 2 tents, 3 people and a dog.  In the time I stayed here, they never had more than just this 1 car, but the number of tents increased to 4.  One morning I saw one of those folks climbing into the dumpster, apparently trying to retrieve something.  He was so intent on what he was doing that he didn't notice us walking down the road beside him, and I decided to keep quiet.  But it looked odd, and I really did wonder what was worth the price he was paying.

One of the reasons I like staying in this campground is that, even last summer, the loop right behind our site isn't being rented out.  That's 21 campsites that don't even appear on the online computer program.  So the dogs and I have an automatic free area to walk in where most other people don't go and where there are rarely other dogs.  And we can get there by walking from our space directly into the space behind us, so we don't have to go out on the road and pass the campsites across from us, which have occasionally had dogs in them.

But while we were there this time, a couple with Washington state license plates set up in that section, and when I told them I didn't think they were renting those sites explained they're the new camp hosts.  Seemed an odd time of year to have camp hosts, which are usually needed for the heavy outdoor months of April to October.  They said they'd previously spent 2 years camp-hosting at Mt. Rainier National Park, and were glad to be in a less rainy climate.

But it turned out to not just be those folks.  A few days later, another camper (I only saw a single woman and her dog) moved in next door to them, put covers over her tires, set out house plants, and gave indications of planning to stay.  So I guessed she was a co-camp host and really started wondering why they'd moved in so much before they were needed.  And typically camp hosts have a sign in front of their campsites so people know who to ask questions of, which neither of these folks had.  Odd but hey, so what.

Except night after night I saw people camped in sites along that row.  None of them ever stayed longer than 1 night, but I just couldn't figure out how they were getting those sites.  The first time I noticed anybody there was the Saturday the campground was so full, and I figured the rangers at the front gate must have given out these sites to the overflow crowd.  But it continued even on nights when the campground was nearly empty, so that didn't make any sense.  Even now those sites don't appear on the on-line reservation page, so I just don't understand what was up.  (We all need a little mystery in our lives.)

Wildlife

You'd think it was spring, the way the birds were carrying on with their songs.  I really enjoyed listening to them, though I couldn't identify any of them by their songs except chickadees (of course).  And I can't seem to recognize Cardinal songs, but there were certainly a lot of them in the campground.  Occasionally, a male would perch in the shrubbery near my window, and Lily would make predatory noises while I watched the bird in awe of its beauty.  

I saw a roadrunner once, and was really glad because I'd seen one a couple of times last summer but was afraid something had happened to it since I hadn't seen it this trip.  But it's still there.  Presumably there's more than one there, because only a few solitary species seem to be content with living alone.

Once, when the sun was shining, I saw a bird of such incredible blue I couldn't believe it was a regular Bluebird.  This bird looked like an enameled jewel and was stunning.  But an online search for blue birds in North America led me to the conclusion that it must have been a Bluebird.  No other species that appears in this area is as seriously blue as they are.

We continued to hear the coyote chorus early in the mornings, and Dexter had a hard time keeping himself from joining in.  And we started seeing lots of rabbits, which I figured explained the number of coyotes we heard.

Other circumstances

Early on a number of mornings, when we left the RV to walk we ran into a really ghastly smell that reminded me of a pulp mill.  Our campsite is visibly close to the farm-to-market road that runs right next to us for the length of the park, and I figured there must be some kind of industry not far away that we could smell when the wind was just right.  Of course, that industry would be keeping odd hours, given that we could smell it at 4:30 AM, though not generally after about 9:00 AM.  I searched online for pulp mills in the area and came up empty, so I don't know what that smell was, besides bad.

One mid-morning I saw 3 police cars driving along the road in front of our space, coming from the interior of the campground.  At other campgrounds when I've seen police, it's always been for a reason - usually the health of one of the campers.  But I think this is the first time I've seen three of them, and I couldn't help but wonder.  My next thought was to wonder if they were checking out the tent city folks down the road, but when we walked by later, nothing had changed.  I never found anyone to ask, though, so I'll just have to keep wondering.

While we were here this time, I got 12 blog posts completed, and I made reservations - in a campground for me and at a boarding place for the dogs - for our upcoming trip to Austin for me to get that crown put on my root-canaled tooth.

Trips to town

We left the campground twice during this period and once when we were here earlier.  Most trips were made to pick up groceries and refill the propane tank.  Also to shake up the contents of my waste tanks so I could dump them when we got back to the campground and hope I was getting rid of most of the waste.

Once while I was out, I watched an accident right in front of me.  It was a 3-way intersection, with everybody having a stop sign.  The car coming from the street to my left moved out into the intersection when it was her turn, and I watched in complete disbelief when the car beside me, headed the way I was, pulled slowly out into the intersection while the other car was still in it - so thoroughly in it that he hit her right rear quarter.  There was absolutely no excuse at all for what he did, and I was trying to figure out where I could park to let the woman know I could be a witness if she needed one, when I saw that the car behind me was a police car, and he had his flashing lights going before I could find a spot.  I figured with him there, and with the cause of the accident so completely obvious he wouldn't mess it up, that I didn't need to stick around.  I can still see it in my mind, happening in real life as slowly as a slow-motion film, and I still can't believe that driver was pulling right into the first driver.  

One trip I drove over to Rockwall to Luxury Coach Services, to get them to show me why David and I hadn't been able to access the bulbs in my rear lights.  My left-hand traveling light hadn't worked since I was in Kansas, I think it was.  The guys there showed me that David and I had neglected to take out 2 screws that we thought had nothing to do with my problem but were actually the solution to it.  So now I know.  And despite 2 workers taking time to change that bulb and redo the sealant to keep out the water that they figured had caused the bulb to explode (which is why it didn't work) not only for the left side lights but for the right side as well - despite all that, the owner didn't charge me a dime.  He said next time I brought the RV in he'd charge me an extra $100, though I knew he was kidding.  Really nice of him.  Great place to take an RV.  

And since I was on the other side of Dallas County, I decided to stop at the recycling place in Richardson, which is the only place I know of in Texas that will take all my recycling, and also stop at my mail box.  Dexter recognizes where he is when we get within a block of Anna and David's house and starts wriggling and is just generally not sure how to contain his excitement.  My family's always really nice about letting me take the dogs inside for a few minutes and let them out into the back yard for a bit, and have a chance to explore the larger spaces inside and out that they don't get with RV life.

The trip out of the campground I made earlier this month was partly a calendar search.  My wonderful credit union in Olympia, WA, always sends a wall calendar every year, and I've found them the perfect size for my life.  But this year they sent a post card instead, saying with rising costs and lowered demand for them, they weren't sending out the calendars.  I was crushed.  I went to several stores in Cedar Hill, but my search was complicated by being much later than when most people shop for calendars, so the selection was limited.  The only ones I found were the big fancy wall calendars that take up a lot more room than the smaller version I've been used to.  But unlike most other people in this increasingly digital age, I needed that paper calendar, so I found the one with the least offensive photos I could and that's what I'll be using this year.  With luck, it'll remind me to shop earlier next year, now that I know my credit union's out of the calendar business.

On Monday the 25th, the day before we were leaving this part of the state, I made one last run up to pick up mail and drop off recycling.  This time, I also made a quick stop at my storage unit.  I only had a pair of shoes to drop off, so it wasn't an important trip, but I wanted to take another look at the life I could have if I stopped traveling around.  Sometimes I miss that life as much as my critters do.  But I still have half the United States to see, and parts of it I've never seen, so I'm by no means ready to abandon this idea.  Obviously I'm having to defer it, but I have to keep believing that things will get better.  Soon.

Once when I was getting propane here in Cedar Hill, I discovered a sizeable pet cemetery.  Even without exploring, I could see some of these grave markers go back to the early 1970s.  The weather was raw and I didn't want to let the dogs out of the RV, so I just made this a quick trip.

Current events

Inauguration

As I'm sure many others did, I spent much of the morning watching the ceremony.  And as I'm sure many others have, I had favorite moments.  

One of them belonged to Sen. Roy Blunt, the senior senator from Missouri.  He said that this presidential inauguration was both commonplace and miraculous: it's commonplace because we've done it every four years since 1789, and it's miraculous because we've done it every four years since 1789.

Another belonged to poet Amanda Gorman, whose poetry was stunning in its strength and imagery, and who said our country isn't broken, only unfinished.

Just typing the thoughts of those two now required a Kleenex, and I went through much of a box that morning.

I watched Pres. Trump's departure and listened to his last speech.  And the thing that impressed me the most was that, until then, I'd never realized the strength of character I'd been watching in every previous 4 years when the outgoing president came to participate in the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next.  I'd failed to appreciate how extremely difficult it was for some of them to be having to sit there (in lousy January weather) and be civil to someone they very often disagreed strongly with.  I saw it for the first time now when our outgoing president chose to act like a petulant child instead of the adult this country needs so badly.  

Trump's certainly not the first to be so badly disappointed: just in my lifetime I've watched Gerald Ford lose to Jimmy Carter, and watched Jimmy Carter lose to Ronald Reagan, and watched George Bush lose to Bill Clinton.  All three of those folks badly wanted to continue in the job, all three seriously disagreed with their successors, yet all three gritted their teeth and went through the motions like grown-ups.  

Speaking of which, I was interested to see that Rep. Jim Jordan and Sen. Ted Cruz both came to the inauguration, and that neither went to Trump's send-off at Andrews AFB.  Although I couldn't bring myself to hope that either of them would eschew partisan posturing for the good of the county, at least they were there.  And for any show of patriotism, in these post-Capitol-invasion days, I am truly grateful.

Other inspiring notes

I heard the Estonia foreign minister on the radio saying the democratic process is like a turtle - it moves slow but it's stable.

On the morning TV news I heard about Camille Richards, a 10-year-old girl who had been soliciting donations of winter coats for other children.  She was including little hand-written cards in the pockets of the coats in hopes of helping the kids who would wear them..  One of the cards said, "Where you start out in life is not where you finish - you can do great things."

And on a slightly different tack, I heard that West Virginia's New River Gorge is now an official national park.  I remember visiting there during my month in West Virginia - April of 2019.  I remember the gorge very well, and the bridge over the gorge very well indeed.  It's a beautiful area, and I hope the national park status serves them well.

Texas - Day 72 - 74 - to and from Lake Whitney

Lake Whitney State Park, Whitney & Cedar Hill State Park, Cedar HIll
Thursday, 14 through Saturday, 16 January 2021

Thursday's and Saturday's routes

Thursday

Errands first

I'd intended to stop for gasoline at a Valero station down the road that, 2 days ago, had regular for $1.87.  I was in a hurry then and didn't stop, which turned out to be a mistake.  In the intervening 2 days, they'd raised their price to $2.15.  A hike like that might make sense on a summer weekend but not a winter Thursday.  I was so peeved I decided to head down the road and see if gas was any cheaper in one of the smaller towns, which I've noticed sometimes it is.

Being still peeved, I decided not to stop for groceries here but to make do with what I had for a couple of days.

However, I did stop at a laundromat.  It'd been weeks since I last did laundry, and though I washed out my underwear at night, I didn't want to do that with t-shirts, so I was running out of clean ones.  What surprised me about this laundromat was that they had numerous signs posted about the virus: they insisted anyone entering the building wear a mask, and they asked customers to wait outside while the machines ran through their cycles, so that no more than 10 people would be inside at one time.  I've seen signs at convenience stores now and then saying these things, but I can't say I've seen them enforced, and this was the first time I've seen that at a laundromat.  So I felt safer and got my clothes clean.

On the road

On my trips to and from Austin, I've seen electronic highway signs announcing a CLEAR Alert, listing a description of the car being sought, like for an AMBER or a SILVER Alert.  But I couldn't figure out from this basic sign what a CLEAR Alert was about.  Today I heard on the radio that it stands for "Coordinated Law Enforcement Adult Rescue."  Online I've learned that it's supposed to fill the gap between missing children and missing senior citizens, and it can be used to locate any adults that are believed to be missing or to have been abducted.  

Once I saw that acronym I got curious about the others.  AMBER stands for "America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response," which isn't particularly descriptive, but it was named after a little girl named Amber who was abducted and murdered in 1996 in Texas.  I can't tell that SILVER Alert stands for anything except presumably the silver color of the hair of the missing person.  These alerts aren't a national program exactly but instead are adopted by each individual state government, so the criteria vary a little by state.  Still, the SILVER Alert is typically used not only for seniors but also for those of any age with mental disabilities.

Throughout the entire drive, I had to contend with a very strong wind, which made driving on these country roads more challenging.

Towns and county courthouses

Today's drive took me through cities as large as Mansfield, pop. 70,170, ("Minutes to Everything, Second to None"), and towns as small as Covington, pop. 269, and everything in between.

And we went through 2 county seats - in Cleburne and in Hillsboro.

Cleburne, pop. 29,337, was founded in 1867, and looks like just what it is - a small rural city in the Texas Hill Country.  But I found an oddity regarding its courthouse.

identified by Google as the
Johnson County Courthouse

close-up - it says
"High School"

Despite this building having very clearly been built to be a school, I would have been willing to accept Google's insistence that it's the current courthouse.  However, my route to this building took me past another building that looked very much like a county courthouse.

Johnson County Courthouse
in Cleburne

This building even has "Johnson County Court House" carved into the stone across the front.  It took a surprisingly diligent search, but I've finally learned that this is the official courthouse.  It was built in 1913 to replace the previous courthouse that had burned down.  This one was designed by admirers of Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie School of architecture.  It went through a substantial renovation, though, between 2005 and 2007, and for that period the county courthouse functions were moved to the 1918 high school building (at top, left) that had been renovated in 2004.  Now that the courthouse functions have been moved back into this 1913 building, the high school building continues to serve as a Justice Center.  

Apparently, Google's mapping program has failed to catch up with a change that happened 14 years ago.  This, of course, is the same mapping program that keeps trying to send me to back doors of businesses and to take shortcuts through alleys that might save me 1 minute of driving time.

Hillsboro, pop. 8,456, originally spelled its name as "Hillsborough."  They changed it in 1854 to comply with some regulation the post office had come up with, and "Hillsboro" it still is.

Hill County Courthouse
in Hillsboro

This building is the 5th for Hill County and was built in 1890 (it seems they'd finally found a keeper).  This is considered the Second Empire style (I'm going to have to take an architecture course after this trip, along with the one for cow behavior).  In 1993 this building was completely gutted by fire - burned to its 4 stone walls - and the county restored it, rather than rebuilding it, for which I thank them, since my personal taste thinks this is much more attractive than almost anything I've seen built since 1993.  

Scenery

For scenery along the drive today, I saw scattered gatherings of houses here and there, not associated with any organized town; these were interspersed with farms.  Aside from fields, plowed and otherwise, I saw cows, horses, donkeys and goats.  I saw one front yard with 2 flagpoles - one with 2 Trump flags on it and the other with the US flag plus 2 more Trump flags.  I still saw some Trump flags and signs here and there, but the numbers were noticeably fewer than I was seeing before the events of January 6th.  This area looked just like the many other areas where support for him had been heavy, so I thought the substantially lower amount of visual support was interesting.

Great Pyrenees

In one field I saw a cow and goats and a huge dog - and all these critters were white.  

I think the dog was a Great Pyrenees - they're typically 2½' to the top of their backs so, yeah, big dogs.  They were bred for tending livestock, which also fits in with what I saw.

All these white critters of various sizes in a field made for a nice picture, just not one I could stop to take.

I kept getting shoved around the road by the very strong winds, which were coming from the north, so for half my drive were crosswinds.

I stopped for gas in Whitney, pop. 2,087, (here the price was $1.95, so it was worth waiting for), and the sign on the door of the attached convenience store said, "Mask are optional."  All of that is their idea - the grammar and the policy.  I understand there may be resistance here in small-town Texas to the idea of wearing a mask, or even the idea that the virus is real, given the probable level of support around here for Pres. Trump and given his hostility to the idea that the virus mattered to anybody.  But still, did they actually have to post a sign?  Couldn't they have just not said anything and not enforced anything?  But I wanted to get the lower gasoline price, so I wore gloves and a mask and hoped that would be enough.

Friday

Lake Whitney State Park

This is a nice place.  Almost all the camping areas were closed - I suppose because of the virus - and even with that there were very few campers on Thursday night, which was fine with me.  And even though the only other camper in my area was right next to me and had a large dog, it still wasn't a problem because his dog was well-behaved and didn't try to attack mine, which meant that mine were well-behaved too.  

It was a very different story when other campers came in for Friday night, but my dogs and I still had a lot of time when we were free to walk around the park.  The dogs kept finding stickers with their feet, but otherwise it was a pleasant place to stay.  Unlike most of the state parks, here at least half the campsites were for tent camping only - no utilities except water.

Lake Whitney has an annual bass fishing tournament, and the state park has several facilities for fishing.  A 15-minute walk from our campsite got us to a fish cleaning station, with a sign saying the facility was closed for the season.  They had an illustrated sign nearby showing 8 different kinds of fish that could be caught in this lake - 3 kinds of bass, 2 kinds of catfish, 2 kinds of sunfish, and a bluegill.

The wind blew so hard on Thursday that there were whitecaps on the lake when we got in.  It didn't settle down much on Friday, either, which wasn't a problem for us, but those like my next-door neighbor who liked to sit outside over a campfire had a harder time with the wind.  Still, natural phenomena come along with the camping experience, like it or not.

By Friday evening, it looked like most campsites had been taken, suggesting this is a very popular state park.

Saturday

I stopped in Whitney for groceries and then headed back north.

In Alvarado, I passed a shop selling pet supplies with a sign saying, "Want a fish tank?  Let minnow."  (It actually took me a minute to get it.)

I went through the town of Venus, pop. 2,960, with the slogan "Stellar by Nature."  The town was established in the late 1880s, originally named Gossip, and then named Venus for the daughter of a local doctor, and I wish I knew the story behind that set of circumstances.

When we got back to Cedar Hill, I discovered the campground was entirely full, which is something I haven't seen even during the summer.  And I finally realized the reason for all this surge to the state parks is that this is a 3-day weekend, in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King.  (Note that he's not a medical doctor any more than Dr. Jill Biden is, but I haven't heard anybody complain about using that title for him, like I've heard about her.  But maybe that's just sour grapes as much as anything.)  I was actually surprised so many people were getting 3-day weekends for this until I remembered with the virus, lots of people may be working from home anyway.

Texas - Day 68 - 71 - in Cedar Hill

Cedar Hill State Park, Cedar Hill
Sunday, 10 through Wednesday, 13 January 2021

The most noteworthy thing to happen during this period was the snow.  We got an inch here in Cedar Hill.  David and Anna told me they only got a sprinkling that melted almost as soon as it hit the ground.  But south toward Waco they got nearly 5".  So weird.  This part of Texas rarely gets any snow to speak of in any year, but to have Waco get so very much more than Dallas is hard to believe.  My dogs got to enjoy it briefly, but even our one inch melted pretty fast when the sun came out.  Too bad.  I'd hoped for more for their sakes.

I only got one more blog post done during these 4 days and not much else.  I'm afraid I was absolutely paralyzed over the events of January 6th, and the continuing stream of information that trickled out about what had happened.  The more I learned, the more upset and fearful for our country I got.

I wasn't very interested in much of anything else but just wanted to learn more about this nightmarish event.  I guess I thought that somehow it would make sense to me if I just learned enough about it.

I'm now able to understand much more clearly than before how people get caught up in some of these far-right-wing conspiracy theories (like QAnon), if they too are upset about something (e.g. their preferred presidential candidate lost) and read more and more to try to understand how it could have happened, and very unfortunately stumble on people who are better at purveying theories as facts than at purveying unpalatable facts.  I'm lucky that I stick to established news sources, and that I've learned to control for the biases of some of the writers, and that my education has taught me to ask "is this true?" and try to find the truth before believing some of the nearly unbelievable things - like US senators and representatives who had been forced to hide in fear for their lives turning around and supporting exactly the line of falsehoods that had propelled the mob in the first place - yeah, unbelievable like that.

Anyway, I didn't get much done in this period.

Texas - Days 66 - 67 - to Austin and back

Leander KOA, Leander & Cedar Hill State Park, Cedar Hill
Friday, 8 and Saturday, 9 January 2021

There's no point in posting a route map, because I took pretty much the same roads for this trip that I did when I came north on December 30th.  On one leg of the drive I took I-35W instead of I-35E, but otherwise the roads were the same.

At various points along the highway I came across "ice prevention operations" - or the signs for them, at least.  This whole area is unusually forecast to have snow on Sunday, and I'm glad I'd planned to get back north on Saturday.

Our vet appointment was at 2:30, and I'd left Cedar Hill before 7:00 AM, just in case.  Most drivers could make that drive in about 3 hours, and when I was driving Momma's Honda we usually made it in 4 hours, including a rest break.  But I don't like going too fast in the RV, and I don't like rushing the rest breaks for the dogs too much, and I didn't know about weekend traffic or road conditions, and I had this appointment time, so it wasn't like an oh-we'll-be-in-around-3:00 kind of trip.  Of course, that meant driving with the sun coming up, which it does at 7:30 these days, and the glare was surprisingly hard to avoid, even though we were going south.  But I still wanted the cushion of extra time.

It turned out that we got to Austin by 12:30, so we had lots of time to wait.  I had an odd experience then.  I'd taken us back to our old neighborhood to walk the dogs around and one of them pooped so I had a little bag I wanted to dispose of.  Friday is trash pick-up day in that neighborhood and I found a trash can that hadn't yet been emptied so I put the poop bag in there.  The next door neighbor was outside and started yelling at me to get that bag out, that he'd taken my photo and if I didn't he was going to report me to the mayor, that it was considered theft of services for me to do that, and on and on.  Well, I didn't agree with much of anything he said, not caring in the slightest if he reported me to anybody (and being sure the mayor wouldn't care either) and knowing for certain he was wrong about the legal basis for that theft-of-services claim, and besides it wasn't his trash can and anyway the truck would be coming by within the hour.  On the other hand, I know a lunatic when I see one so I took the bag of poop out of the can and walked away with the dogs.  And darned if he didn't watch me until we were out of sight.  Wanted to be sure I didn't put it in someone else's trash can, I guess.  To be fair, I would have.  But I wonder whether he's always been like that or if his mental health is suffering from the pandemic-induced isolation.

At the vet's office, they still have Christmas cards posted, and I saw one that said, "Feliz Naughty Dog" which isn't one I've seen before.  And the dogs both got their first canine influenza shots.

We spent the night at the Northwest Austin KOA in Leander.  Leander, pop. 56,111, is about 20 miles from the vet's office, and I liked this campground much better than the one in east Austin I'd stayed in a couple of weeks ago.  They still charged a lot of money because of being so close to Austin, but the campsites here were much more level than at the other place.  Also the other place wouldn't let me pay actual coins for the laundry machines but instead I'd have to put money on a card and too bad if I put more money on the card than I ended up needing, whereas this place used real money.  The drive from here to the dentist's office is about 10-15 minutes longer than from the other place, but it's not like it's an hour more or anything.  So I decided when I came back down at the end of the month, I'd plan to stay here.

The next morning I started much later - about 10 till 9:00, and I stopped at a grocery store before we left, figuring if I waited until I got to Cedar Hill I'd be fighting a Saturday afternoon crowd, plus other people stocking up before bad weather set in.  Much better to go early in the day.

On Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me! I got to hear Peter Sagal commiserate with everyone for the "terrible events of December 37th" [aka Jan. 6th] and promise that next week he'd be glad to welcome us to 2021.  

It was a little discouraging, hoping so much that this year would be better than last, only to have a sitting president rev up citizens with tweets about how the election was being stolen; with tweets telling them to come to a "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th.  Be there, will be wild;" and when they got there recited long lists of examples he claimed showed how the Democrats and fake media had stolen the election, and gave exhortations for these citizens to "fight like hell or you're not going to have a country anymore" and to "walk down Pennsylvania Avenue and give our Republicans - our weak ones . . . the kind of pride and boldness they need to take back our country."  An hour's worth of this.  

And walk down Pennsylvania Avenue they did.  And because almost all participants were White, none of the law enforcement agencies believed there'd be any violence so weren't prepared to deal with it.  As a result, 5 people died and, I believe, a complete insurrection with assassinations was just barely averted.  I believe most of these people truly thought following these instructions from the President of the United States was the right thing to do, the patriotic thing to do.  It doesn't change the fact that they were doing the most unpatriotic thing that's happened in our country since the events that led to the Civil War.  And it really doesn't change the fact that it was the president who spent weeks telling everybody the election had been fraudulent and the results needed to be reversed.  Yeah, I'm with Peter Sagal - this should all be relegated to the 2020 bonfire.

I saw an electronic sign on the highway saying, "Slow Down - You're Already In Texas."  And another one saying, "Drive Friendly - The Texas Way."  Uh huh.  Sorry but friendly is not the word I'd use to describe driving in Texas.  Over and over just today I had people refuse to move over so I could get on the highway, even when no one was anywhere near the lane next to them.  Nope.  Not friendly.  I'd have to go to Indiana for friendly drivers.

I was surprised to see that Texas has a cheese cave in the Waco area - the Brazos Valley Cheese Cave.  They say that the cave itself is currently closed to visitors, but they've set up a big observation window so people can see into the cave, and they've got a store where they sell their cheeses.  It clearly sounds like a place I need to check out.

I passed 2 ranches next door to each other;  one was named "Fat Chance" and the other "Second Chance."

I noticed that a volunteer highway litter crew near the DFW area was identified as Woden's Folk Kindred.  This turns out to be a group of Heathens.  Some aspects of their approach to religion appear in their webpage addressing treatment of addiction, depression and PTSD, which they call a Path to the Healthy Way.  Here's the link to that page in case you're curious.   https://www.wodensfolkkindred.org/heilvegr

Today (Saturday) was my Daddy's birthday.  He'd've been 101 so not likely he'd have lived that long.  But having him die at the early age of 66 robbed both him and me of a lot of years we might have enjoyed getting to know one another as adults.  I was really lucky to have had that with my Momma and it makes me even more aware of what I missed with Daddy.

Speaking of which reminds me of a book Daddy read when I was young called The Super-Americans.  It was about Texans and included such gems as "no Texan has a father or a grandfather.  They all have daddies and granddaddies."  The times when that was true have nearly gone now, but you can still hear language like that in the more rural areas of the state.  For a 2010 perspective on what the book was, you can check this link.   https://www.texasobserver.org/twilight-of-the-super-americans

Texas - Day 58 - 65 - in Cedar Hill

Cedar Hill State Park, Cedar Hill
Thursday, 31 December 2020 - Thursday, 7 January 2021

And Happy New Year to all!  Given the incredible level of trauma we've all been through on so many levels during this past year, I can only hope to the depths of my soul that this new year will be better.  Surely we have nowhere to go but up.

I'd originally made a reservation here for 3 nights, but ended up expanding that twice until I got up to 9 nights total.  I wanted to spend New Year's Eve and Day someplace I knew I could be comfortable, and having stayed here several times last summer, I figured this would work.  And it has. 

Most of the time I can get an internet signal, though it's occasionally a little weak.  But it's there, and I was almost a month behind in posting on this blog.  I write this as much to preserve my own memory as for anyone else, and I wanted to get down my memories of what I'd been seeing before I lost them.

I also felt like I needed to regroup.  I'd been traveling so nearly constantly for more than 3 weeks that I was feeling disoriented.  And besides that, I still had medical appointments that I needed to address.

I had no clear idea of where I'd be going next, and the worsening of the pandemic was making it seem the only sensible choice was to sit very still while this thing raged and to have as little direct contact with other people as possible.  So I opted to sit, at least for a little while.

New Year's
That bad weather I drove through on my way here continued for several days.  We had pouring rain for most of New Year's Day, but I know this area's been well into drought status for many months, and I lived in southeast Alaska and western Washington for too many years to mind rain.  It's lucky I'd asked the dog boarding place to give my puppies baths while they were there, because it meant the wet dog smell was substantially easier to live with.

I made my version of Hoppin' John (sausage, onion, black-eyed peas, rice, tomatoes and Rotel) and had it with champagne.  The two very definitely don't go together, but I wanted some concrete recognition that I'm expecting 2021 to be better than its predecessor, and I wanted the stew to maybe help that along with some good luck.  I wanted to make cornbread to go with it but just didn't want to hang out in the rain getting the ingredients out of the basement storage area.

Somehow I managed to mess up my left ankle, and I have no idea how.  All I know is that some internal screw-up meant I could hardly walk at all without pain.  So between that and the heavy rain, my poor puppies got short-changed on walks for a couple of days.  As I expected, by continuing to try to use it, but not pushing too hard to pretend it was normal, it gradually got better over several days.

Wildlife
We continued to see that one coyote I'd seen our first night - not daily sightings but pretty often.  It showed absolutely no fear of us at all, but instead seemed more curious about the dogs than anything else.  It was a real nuisance, because curiosity was definitely not the reaction the dogs had to the coyote.

There was one time we all saw it heading toward us from quite a ways away.  Part of the time the coyote was trotting along the road, then it would turn into a vacant campsite and trot through the woods, then come back out to the road, then turn back into the bushes - the whole time heading in our direction.  It finally worked its way around behind us, though of course we'd been tracking its progress and turned around to see where it was going, so it wasn't any longer behind us.  And then this coyote had the nerve to come out of the bushes and sit in the driveway of a campsite and just stare at the dogs.  

Meanwhile, I had my hands truly full just trying to control Dexter who was going berserk.  Because the coyote kept moving, I didn't know what direction to walk the dogs in to get away, and anyway I've learned that trying to walk when I'm hanging on to Dexter in his going-crazy mode leaves me really vulnerable to getting tangled up with him and falling down, which then means I can't hang onto him.  So the 3 of us just stayed where we were while this coyote was sashaying around.  As it got closer to us, Dexter got even more frenzied, and I was finally holding him both by the leash and by his collar, while he was standing on his hind legs in his desperate attempts to fling himself at this wild cousin.  By the time it sat down to stare at us, I was furious with that coyote, and just beginning to feel like it was stalking us when it finally melted back into the bushes and left.

Sometimes when we're on our early morning walks, one or both of the dogs react in such a way that I think it's a coyote they've sensed, rather than a rabbit, which we also see sometimes.  One morning, Dexter got excited and I was wondering if we should even keep walking or turn around and go back.  Then I heard several somethings walking through the leaves in the trees around us.  It was an odd, almost creepy, sound because it was quite clearly more than one of whatever it was, and they were definitely moving along through the dead leaves not far at all from where the 3 of us stood.  In the dark.  So at that point I decided to take the dogs back inside.

A short time later, we all quite clearly heard a pack of coyotes howling at the night, so of course Dexter had to bark back at them, at which point they definitely barked back at him, and he barked back at them - it was weird to listen to, this back-and-forth.  I had the impression they could understand each other, though I would have expected them to speak different languages.  After all, all human beings are genetic relatives but don't speak the same language at all.  But hearing all this barking so soon after I'd heard the footsteps in the leaves made me think maybe it was several coyotes we'd heard.

Speaking of languages, I heard 2 birds who seemed to be having a conversation.  One was saying "JimmyJimmyJimmy" and then the other one said "GracieGracieGracie", back and forth over and over.  I guessed that they were the same species of bird and thought it odd that they weren't saying the same thing.  But on other days I heard different words repeated like these 2 were, in tones that sounded like they were still the same species as before.  So is the point the 3-time repetition and the cadence and tonal quality, rather than what they're saying?

I heard chickadees saying "tzzz, tzzz" which is something I didn't know chickadees said.  But these definitely did.

Medical appointments
The root canal guy told me I could get a crown put on as soon as my dentist could fit me in.  But when I called for the appointment, I learned my dentist always takes the 1st 2 weeks of January off, and when he's back works only Tuesdays and Thursdays.  He looks old enough that I'm guessing he's regarding this as semi-retirement, which is certainly reasonable but a nuisance for those (very few) of us who have to make special arrangements to come to town for an appointment.  

So with all that, I couldn't get a crown appointment until January 29th - a full month after the root canal.  A nuisance partly because it means I'll have to plan travel around needing to be in Austin at the end of the month, and partly because I'm already ready to eat nuts again.  Oh well.  At least I have the appointment.

I also had another phone call appointment with my regular doctor.  She'd gotten the results of the blood test and the urine sample and said I'm healthy, which is certainly nice to know.  I always like to hear a doctor say my results from any kind of medical test are normal.  She told me to limit the amount of water I drink because I'd apparently been washing too much sodium out of my system by swigging water too often.  I was absolutely delighted to have a doctor tell me to be sure to keep my sodium levels up, given that I believe salt is one of the 4 basic food groups.

She also told me to get the new pneumonia shot, which she said is substantially better than the previous version, and said I needed to get the 2-shot series for shingles.  I know I had a shot for that some years ago, having had measles when I was a kid and being worried about the torture of shingles my aunt Alice went through.  But I don't remember getting a 2nd shot so am probably not protected like I thought I was.

And she told me that the blood pressure levels I was reporting to her sounded much healthier with this new medication she'd prescribed, and she said it would stabilize in the next couple of months.  I reported one set of readings where I'd gone from 181/93 to 136/81 in the space of 5 minutes, and she asked me if I was under a lot of stress.  Apparently readings like that indicate stress.  One wouldn't think a life like mine would be stressful, but in the last few weeks I've been noticing a knot in my lower back which I know from experience means I'm feeling stressed.

I guessing the entire country is feeling stressed from the political situation, and I have my usual stresses of idiotic dog behavior and where-do-I-go-next-if-anywhere questions.  But it's nice to know that I don't have to count worries about my blood pressure among the stresses.

Plans
When I got that dentist appointment for the end of the month, I decided to board the dogs again while I was back in town.  I don't expect the crown business to be particularly painful, but I thought it'd be a chance for the dogs and me to take a break from each other, give them some time with other dogs, and give me some time to get some cabin cleaning done, which is hard to do with the dogs here.

Going back to the dog boarding place meant I'd need to get them the canine influenza shots, so I called up my vet in Austin, figuring that'd be easier than trying to find a vet here that would take new patients (which many don't do these days).  Well, Ann reminded me that this is a series of 2 shots for each dog, so I'd need to get one this week, and then get the 2nd one when I go back down at the end of the month.  That meant a scramble to find someplace for us to stay overnight, since I wanted to stay here at Cedar Hill a while longer to continue getting caught up but didn't want to go down to Austin and come back all in the same day.

So I'll go down to Austin Friday the 8th and come back Saturday the 9th.  This campsite I keep choosing is still the only one I want, because it's a perfect location for me.  Unfortunately, someone else thought so too, and they've reserved it for the nights of the 14th and 15th, leaving me either to pick another spot or go to a different campground.

The thing is, though, that I'd have to leave this campground anyway because the state parks won't let anyone stay longer than 2 weeks at a stretch.  They'll let you leave for a night and then come back, but you have to be physically gone.  So I decided to go somewhere else for those 2 nights, and then I could stay until it was time to go back down to Austin for my appointment.

The next problem was trying to find someplace to go for those 2 nights.  I could find places that were available on the Thursday, but many campgrounds were packed to the gills on the Friday.  I ended up finding a space at Lake Whitney State Park, which is down south of here near Hillsboro, on the way to Waco.  So we'll stay there on the 14th and 15th, and then I reserved my usual site here from the 16th until the 26th, when we'd go back to Austin.  

It took so long to make those decisions and then make those arrangements that I didn't bother tackling the question of where I'll be going when I leave Austin.  I really want to get back on the road, but with the way the virus seems to be intensifying, and with this new variant that's much more contagious, I don't know where to go. 

Certainly Texas isn't a healthy state to be in - the numbers are shooting up all over the state, including here in the DFW area.  But for me the difference is that I'm already here so I don't need to quarantine as I would in New Mexico, for instance, and being raised here I know the language and the customs and the basic geography so I feel less likely to make a deadly mistake.  It's all definitely scary and uncertain and I decided to put off travel decisions for a while longer.