Road Trip - Day 17

It was time to leave the awesome Alderman's. Sad, especially since we were leaving Izzy behind to stay with her Auntie Sarah while we finished up our road trip and find a place to live (although I don't know that she's suffering all that much...I think she's probably getting downright spoiled).

However, we knew after spending this time with them we'd definitely do another family get-together soon. It was too much fun not to.

We had to make a stop at Costco to replenish our Costco supplies--turkey, bread, berries, avocados, cheese, fruit leather, chips, milk, jelly beans...you know, important things. We got the kids situated with their lunches and set up with a movie so we could get on the road for the longest leg of our journey yet.

We were excited to stop over in San Antonio for all sorts of neat stuff, especially to check out The Alamo. Driving around downtown, it looked pretty neat and we were anxious to get out and check everything out. So we started looking for a parking spot (we had the camper behind us, remember...). We finally pull into a parking lot, which was at least half empty, get out and start walking downtown. And then I see the sign that says, "No RV'S or trucks with trailers." Awesome. So we walk over to where we pay to get out to see if we could talk to the person there and see if it would be okay since there were PLENTY of other places to park. Go figure, it's just someone behind a speaker. In reality, we could have just parked there and no one would have known the difference.

Instead, we decided to ask if it would be okay if we just stayed there. She was adamant that we could not and it would be a $100 fine if we did. Sigh. So I went across the street to a parking deck to ask if we could park there as I didn't see any signs saying we couldn't. Nope. But he recommended the dirt lot next to the garage. Great!

We pull in and see the spots marked off for RV's and trailers...for SIXTY DOLLARS A PIECE!!! So we grumpily got back in and headed out for our campground.


Anyways...apparently Texas is in a drought. This became more apparent the more westward we went--large cattle farms with very few cattle (apparently they were being forced to kill them off), and we haven't been able to have a camp fire since Louisiana! There were also many other signs of where fires had been and were currently going on...kinda scary.

So we finally got to the South Llano River State Park just outside of a teensy, cute town called Junction, TX. It was literally in the middle of nowhere...which we're noticing to be a common theme the further west we get, lol. When we pulled in though, we were greeted by a ton of deer and the campground host welcoming us to "the best campground in Texas."

It was pretty neat...extremely quiet, which made for good bike riding.

There was also a really fun little swimming hole when you first enter the campground, which we put to good use.

I think all of us biffed it at least once because the rocks were SO slippery, Sam was the only one who didn't in his awesome aqua socks, hehe.

Swimming was a good way to get out some energy.

We seriously saw over 100 deer in the first few hours we were at this campground, it was pretty amazing. These ones are fenced in as they're owned by a rancher, but there are a TON of them that just freely run about the campground.

This one was at our camp site, waiting for us when we got back from swimming. They definitely weren't very shy. They were out eating in the brush maybe 20 feet from our table, while we were eating our dinner.

There was a ton of other wildlife as well--tons of wild turkeys, hummingbirds, woodpeckers, raccoons, skunks, and even coyote and bear tracks!

We stripped everyone's wet clothes off and before I could get Sam's dry ones on, he'd escaped...good thing there weren't many people around.

The sky here was gorgeous. Unfortunately, we were all so exhausted, we could hardly stay awake to look at the stars, plus the danged moon was SO bright. We slept with all of our windows open on the camper (mostly because I didn't think there would be any way that it would get down to the 50 degrees that was forecasted...and oh it did. BRR!), and the moon kept waking me up, shining right into my window.

Up tomorrow: New Mexico!