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Posts Tagged ‘Texas’

Dublin Dr. Pepper Plant Saves a Cold Journey

Posted in Travel, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 11, 2011| 5 Comments »

“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans are fruitless … we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” John Steinbeck.

Icicles on Gypsy Lee as she sits outside my daughter's home on the outskirts of Dallas. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Travels With Maggie

I’m in Dallas. It’s currently 6:30 a.m. and 23 degrees outside, where my RV, Gypsy Lee, is parked on the street. My cocker spaniel and I, however, are warm and snug inside the home of my oldest daughter, Deborah.

 It’s a rare occasion when Maggie and I don’t sleep in our own above-the-cab bed. But since running the heater constantly all night would have drained the battery in my unplugged home, we had no choice.

It’s a day, I decided on waking, for a cozy chair, a blanket to snuggle beneath and a good book. I have all three, the book being Susan Albert’s “An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days,” a writer’s journal.

 It’s also a day that reminds me of the first time Deborah, who thinks spending a night at a Holiday Inn is camping, decided she wanted to experience my vagabond life for a few days. The plan was that I would pick her up in Odessa, Texas, where her contract job had ended, and the two of us would take a few days driving back to Dallas, which was almost 400 miles away.

 When we had made these plans the weather was sunny and warm. The day I picked her up in Odessa, it was cold and rainy. We made it to San Angelo, where we spent the night at Spring Creek Marina and RV Park on Lake Nasworthy. I had stayed here before and loved that I could walk Maggie beside the lake.

That's my daughter, Deborah, on the left during our stop at the Dr. Pepper plant in Dublin, Texas. -- Photo by Pat Bean

But the next morning was not a day for walking. Icicles hung from my RV and the windows inside had ice on them. We defrosted everything and got back on the road for a miserable day of driving in fog and sleet.

By afternoon, Deborah was ready for a long, hot shower and a warm soft bed. But hot water in my tiny shower is limited and my couch isn’t t exactly soft. We spent the night in a Holiday Inn in the small town of Brownwood – and hoped for a better tomorrow.

It wasn’t.

 We decided to forgo our lollygagging and drive as quickly back to Dallas as Gypsy Lee would take us. As far as giving my daughter a taste of what I consider a fantastic lifestyle, the trip had been a big bust. Then we came to Dublin, Texas, home of the oldest Dr. Pepper plant in the world. More importantly, it’s a rare facility that still uses the original recipe calling for pure cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup.

My daughter, who loves the original Dr. Pepper, hadn’t known the city was on our route. She was ecstatic and eager to stop. We spent a pleasant hour in the plant’s soda shoppe drinking Dr. Pepper and eating a hamburger lunch. My daughter then bought a couple of cases of the original Dr. Pepper to take home with her.

She was finally a happy camper, one who now knew one of my travel secrets: The unexpected is as important to a successful journey as the weather.

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Uluru, The Great Wall and Yosemite are Tweeting Me

Posted in Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , on January 8, 2011| 5 Comments »

 “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on you own. And you know what you know. You are the guy who’ll decide where to go.” Dr. Seuss

Ayers/Uluru Rock in Australia Calls to Me -- Five photos stitched together by Stuart Edwards

 

 Travels With Maggie

 I was on the road yesterday, traveling from my oldest son’s home in Harker Heights to my oldest daughter’s home in Rowlett, located just outside Dallas. It was a 170-mile, three-hour drive up Texas’ Highway 35 through Temple, Waco and Waxahatchie, the three cities big enough to be marked in bold on my map.

 I was accompanied by bumper-riding cars and blow-my-small-RV-off-the-road-semis. OK, I exaggerate. Most of the cars allowed a respectable distance between each other and the semis that whizzed past me only created a small crosswind that required me to keep both hands on the wheel. It could have been a monotonous drive.

 Instead I kept myself entertained contemplating the suggestive post to those of us who have taken the pledge to blog daily during 2011. The WordPress moderator asked: What places would you like to visit and why?

First on my list would be Australia, and more specifically, Ayers/Uluru Rock. Located smack dab in the middle of this country that has long fascinated me, I’m not sure exactly why I want to stand beside this huge sandstone monolith that is sacred to the Aborigines. The best I can come up with is that it calls to me. And one of these days soon I intend to answer.

Great Wall of China -- Photo by Jakub Halun

Great Wall of China -- Photo by Jacob Halun

 Second on my list of places I want to visit would be China, where I want to walk on the Great Wall. A designated World Heritage Site, as is Uluru, the wall also calls to me. It’s the man-made equivalent of Australia’s rock island. I’ve long been fascinated with the Mongolian legacy of domination that began with Genghis Khan. The wall failed to keep the nomad hordes out of China and represents, to me, the multitude of guarded borders of today’s world that are proving to be just as ineffective.

 One of these days we’re going to have to accept that we all live on the same planet and if we ever are going to have peace, we’re going to have to learn how to play nicely in the sandbox.

Mirror Lake at Yosemite National Park -- Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

 The third place that sits at the top of my list of must-see places is Yosemite National Park. It’s the only western park of significance that I haven’t visited. It’s magnificent scenery calls to me, and this call I plan to answer this fall. I can’t wait to blog about it as one of my daily posts.

 So what places call to you? I would really like to know.

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Winter Bares Ink Lake State Park’s Soul

Posted in Birds, Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , on January 5, 2011| 1 Comment »

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man (or woman) contemplates it, bearing with him (her) the image of a cathedral.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Devil's Waterhole at Inks Lake State Park. -- Photo by Benjamin Bruce

 

Travels With Maggie

When I sit for awhile, I check out nearby scenic landscapes and interesting places to visit. One of these within easy driving distance of Harker Heights, Texas, where my RV is now resting up, is Inks Lake State Park. It’s just 69 miles away, perfect for a day’s get-away when wanderlust gets the best of Maggie and me.

It’s a special place to me because I camped there with my children in the 1960s. The park was very undeveloped at that time, as were we as campers. Instead of the high-tech tents and camping equipment that eventually found their way among my possessions, we used blankets as sleeping bags and tin foil as cooking equipment.

The park today is quite amenable to campers, with electrical hookups for RV-ers like me and a few cabins for those who are not into tents and sleeping on the ground. It also has nearly eight miles of developed trails which I love to explore.

In spring, this Texas recreation spot park is filled with wildflowers, including Texas’ famous bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush, and twittering birds. In winter, I found it a peaceful place where the landscape’s pink, granite rock formations bared their soul.

It’s reasonable to say that both the park and I have come a long way in the passing years.

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Birds and Travel Go Together

Posted in Birds, Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on January 4, 2011| Leave a Comment »

 

A northern mockingbird was my first bird of the new year. -- Photo by Pat Bean

 “Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.” — Henry Van Dyke

Travels With Maggie

I’m a passionate birdwatcher, who keeps a list of birds I’ve seen. My life list now totals 696 bird species. It’s a respectable number for this late-blooming birder, but far from spectacular.

If you want to know more about the birding numbers game you should read “The Big Year” by Mark Obmascik. It’s a great read even if you aren’t a birder. It’s about three guys who spend a year chasing birds all across North America. At the whisper of a rare bird alert, they would fly thousands of miles on a minute’s notice.

Although I did once drive 400 miles to see one particular bird, these days I usually just bird where my travels take me. I check out bird festivals going on while I’m in the vicinity, and hook up with local Audubon chapters for birding field trips. This past year these efforts, including one day when I hired a guide to help me find the golden-cheeked warbler that I had been trying to find for three years, earned me 12 new life birds. And yes, the warbler was one of them.

I spotted this yellow-crowned night heron at the Sea Center in Lake Jackson, Texas. -- Photo by Pat Bean

This year’s birding efforts, meanwhile, have begun slower than normal. I’ve been parked in my son’s driveway here in Harker Heights all this week and a cold front moving through the area seems to have kept the birds tucked away.

At least they’re not falling out of the sky dead, as red-winged blackbirds and starlings have been doing in Arkansas the past couple of days. That’s a scary thing because birds, like the canaries coal miners carried into the tunnels with them as their bad air detectors, are indicators of an environment’s health.

My first bird of this new year was a northern mockingbird, appropriate since it’s Texas’ state bird. It was a brilliant gray and white fellow with yellow eyes that landed on a fence about eight feet from my RV window. As I watched, it flashed its long tail in the air – then pooped.

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A Second Look Proves Me Wrong

Posted in Birds, Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 8, 2010| Leave a Comment »

 

Vernon, Texas, sunrise -- Photo by Pat bean

 

 “To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with Light.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

Travels With Maggie

 The 304 miles I drove this day – from Clayton, New Mexico to Vernon, Texas – took me through cattle, oil and agriculture lands with only a few small aging towns scattered between. The exception was Amarillo, but I skirted around this large “Yellow Rose of Texas” city, so nicknamed because amarillo is the Spanish word for yellow.

It was a day when roadside birds were few and flat boring scenery dominated the landscape. In fact, the only interesting thing I recorded in my journal about this day’s drive was a sign I saw in Chillicothe, Texas, where a tinge of poverty pervaded everything. This sign let me know that not all had given up hope.

“Cute Texas stuff for sale,” it read. Not a bad sales ploy I thought. Texans do like to display native doodads.

Meanwhile, I did what I usually do when I have miles to go and scenery that becomes mindless. I put a book on tape in my CD player. The one of choice for this day was a recording of early Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories.

Before I knew it, I was pulling into the Rocking A RV Park in Vernon, This city of about 12,000, located on the Old Chisholm Trail and home of rock-and-roller Roy Orbison, had the only decent RV park for miles around.

That evening when Maggie and I strolled around the park, I looked out over an industrial site and though how drab it looked. Fortunately I looked again early the next morning. The above photograph changed my mind about the local scenery. Suddenly things didn’t look so dull at all.

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