On to Choke Canyon

We left McKinney Falls this morning. Well, actually, we left just after noon on our trek south to Choke Canyon State Park outside of Three Rivers, TX. For the first few years that our travels took us south, we regularly stayed at Tips Park, which is in Three Rivers. That’s not possible now, and the landscape around this area has changed.

Now there are lots of “RV Parks,” but not the type we stay in. There are lots of "cabins" (which includes motel style accommodations). They are all filled with oil field workers, brought here by the fracking revolution. Highway 72, which we take from Three Rivers west to the Calliham Unit of Choke Canyon, is being widened and resurfaced, which it certainly needs because of the endless flow of trucks and oil field equipment.

Unfortunately, we had a long wait on that account. A long stretch of the highway is limited to one lane traffic, so it’s being controlled by flaggers. We got caught in a very long traffic jam on I35 too, caused by a traffic accident. The end result was that we arrived at the campground at 4:15 p.m., rather later in the day than we prefer.

We got a nice site with a view of the lake, site #131. After getting set up, we biked around the park. It’s the first time we’ve really been in a rural setting for a bit. The bonus is that we see much more wildlife. We saw lots of deer, including bucks with some nice antlers. Sometimes we saw just one or two, but one group must have had nearly a dozen, with different sizes and shapes, but only one buck. We also saw large flocks of wild turkeys. Overhead were more than a dozen circling turkey vultures, gracefully spiraling in the thermals.

Both of us are suffering from colds right now, so we sound rather pitiful with our sniffling. Good thing we have a few days here to recuperate and rest up before going on down to the Rio Grande Valley.