Yup, he's one happy pup! And so are we: we're heading out South Llano River State Park for a long weekend; I'm taking a day off on Monday since this park is more than four hours from home and I could use a break from work for a minute; we're in our busy season and, y'all, my team is AMAZING, but I'm not sure I've ever been so exhausted! Good news is: we're hiring two more VECs and I get to make those calls - offering someone a job is one of the BEST parts of my new role! Makes me about as happy as Diesel looks up there!
It was another great stop - level sites, pull thru, full hook-ups. Large, fenced Kamp K9 for Diesel to get a chance to run around in. I'm starting to realize the difference between the KOA Holiday and the KOA Journey: holidays are much like RV resorts - swimming pools, bike trials, activities - this one even had an on site cafe and bike rentals. Whereas the Journeys are more like near-the-highway, just stopping over for a night, no extras. Either way, we really appreciate that they exist because it was so much easier to get up Saturday and only have another 2 hours to drive.
It was a beautiful morning for a drive thru the Texas Hill Country. RDB enjoys driving thru the terrain (one of the hills had a steep grade of 7% - he mastered it like it was nothing!). We made it into the park a little before noon, got our assigned spot and settled in. FYI - Site #10 is _not_ long enough and wide enough for both the trailer with slides out and the truck. We ended up parking the RAM at the nearby bathhouse (and hoping that we don't get in trouble for it) (**Spoiler alert: we did.)
We took a trip into Junction just 10 minutes away, on the hopes of finding a local place to eat, but its such a small town the only local spot we were able to support was the grocery store. We did get a chance to check out the Kimble County Courthouse. Third courthouse building for this county - the other two were destroyed by fire (I can't help but notice, a _lot_ of courthouse are destroyed by fire. Wonder what the relation is there?)
We were excited to be at South Llano State Park because its one of the few parks in the State system that is a certified
International Dark-Sky Association location. The Bortle Dark-Sky scale is a measure of how easily you can see celestial objects from any specific place and ranges from Class 1, the darkest skies available on Earth, through Class 9, inner-city skies. South Llano’s Bortle Scale rating is 3. Where we live in Houston is an 8/9.
The
light pollution map on the left is Houston, and with the one on the right having the State Park at the center crosshairs. The
Bortle Dark-Sky Scale really shows you how much of a difference being out in the country can make when you want to see the stars. I booked this campground hoping that we would get a glimpse of the Milky Way again. Last time we saw it was just about an hour south of here at Kerrville-Scheiner Park
several years ago.
What I didn't think about when I booked this trip, though, was which phase the moon would be in the weekend we would be there. Though the potential to see the Milky Way was great, and we _did_ see a lot more stars than usual, since the moon was
waxing gibbous, what we really saw was the moonlight. LOTS of moonlight.
Can you see all those tiny pinpricks of light? Stars! With a long exposure on my iPhone I was able to capture some of the night sky - the foreground is lit by that large moon behind us. We'll be back - and I'll plan the next trip around a new moon, where we won't have all that extra light and can just see the dark sky - and, hopefully, the Milky Way.
Sunday morning we woke relatively early (like, 8ish 'yall. That's early for us!) We had a slow and easy morning, enjoying coffee and tea, and getting things set up to watch our Steelers play at noon. RDB and I have Sunday ticket with our cable subscription, and thanks to the DirectTV app, we can stream the games when we're away from home. But truth be told, no one wants to watch an entire football game on a tiny iPhone screen so RDB bought us an
iPhone to HDMI converter and now we can stream the game on the TV in the living room. Score!
While the game was on, I pulled out a craft/painting project that I brought along. Facebook advertising brought this one to my attention: the
Mural Mosaics Global Roots Project. I purchased two tiles and received a green kit and blue kit. I'm working on the green one at home, and thought it would be fun to bring the blue along and paint a bit this weekend. RDB, Bestie, and I recently did a Paint with a Twist night that featured an impressionistic bluebonnet, so I replicated that for this project. A whole field of bluebonnets! It was fun and I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. I'll send a picture of it in to Mural Mosaics and it will be added to the America Connects Tree mural. How cool is that?!
We fixed crockpot BBQ chicken drumsticks for dinner (and wondered why we don't use our crockpot more often?) in an effort to not heat up the camper with cooking. We're on a 30amp site, which means we can only run one A/C unit (I know, poor us!) and with the temps still in the high 90*s and the front half of the camper getting direct sun on its broad side, it's a bit hard to keep it comfortably cool. We can't wait till fall and winter get here - it's our favorite time to be out camping.
As the evening started to fade, we rode over to the front of the park and set chairs down to watch the sun set, and then the moon rise, next to the South Llano river.
We had the river all to ourselves - though it was certainly popular throughout the day with families swimming in the waters and tubing down the river. RDB and I put our feet in for a few moments to enjoy the cool waters, and then sat back and just listened to the river as it cascaded over the rocks and swirled around the pool before continuing on its way into the park and beyond.
As we drove back tour campsite for our last night, we kept things nice and slow - in the few passes we'd already made, putting together the video for this campground's Park n' Drive, we had seen LOTS of wildlife: several armadillo, a possum, jack rabbits (their ears nearly as large as their bodies!), plenty of birds, deer, and a large black hog trotting across the road. If you want to be surrounded by wildlife, this is the park for you! We even saw a heard of deer, at least 20 of them, our first night!
Monday morning meant packing up for the drive home. This park is a solid 4.5 hours from the house - so taking the extra day off meant that we could enjoy a little bit of the morning before starting that trek back across central Texas to out hot and humid Houston. I can't wait to book this campground again and have the chance to do some hiking, exploring, and hopefully, dancing in the 'new' moonlight under the Milky Way.
We were in site #10 at South Llano River State Park. Right next to the (nice) bathhouse, with 30amp and water, and tree limbs that are annoyingly in the way of being able to fully utilize the site (we couldn't back all the way in, or we wouldn't have been able to put our slides out). So, we ended up parking the truck over by the bathhouse - and got a "ticket" from the park Ranger notifying us that we needed to move it to overflow parking (a solid hike away from the campsite). So, we parked perpendicular in front of the camper... which was not good for me: trying to tuck in, I managed to hit the nose of the camper with the side mirror. Thank goodness they're built with the "break away/fold back" feature these days, there was no noticeable damage to the camper or the mirror. My pride, on the other hand.....*eyeroll*
For more camping photos, go here.
(PS: I looked up the next new moon and three day weekend - just happens to be Memorial Day next year.... guess we'll be back then!)
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