Back in Texas

November 12, 2022

We are back in Texas for the holidays. The next couple months we will be spending time with family, getting all our medical appointments taken care of, and doing some maintenance on the RV and Jeep. We do have a one week trip planned during this time but since we wouldn’t be traveling most of the time I will only check in here occasionally until we hit the road again in February.  

11/6- Today was a lazy day. Laid around this morning then this afternoon we went to Garvan Woodland Gardens in Hot Springs. It is an amazing beautiful botanical garden with lots of trails and some dynamic architectural structures, including The Anthony Chapel. We spent almost two hours there hiking and exploring the park. https://www.garvangardens.org/

11/7- Frank had to work all day so we weren’t able to spend anytime checking out the area. I did enjoy a long hike through our campground. The campground is so big I was only able to explore about half of it today. Catharine’s Landing is a huge campground with over 250 RV slots, a half dozen Yurts, a dozen tent campsites and a dozen cabins spread over 400 acres. There are multiple hiking trails, a Frisbee golf course, and a boat launch.   The campground also has zip lines and climbing towers. https://rvcoutdoors.com/catherines-landing/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAsdKbBhDHARIsANJ6-jfrSqeBbFt0DJtoSdE3DwxzK06u72sOGAkGKi9n8QnMGFaXKNqnkoUaAj5uEALw_wcB

11/8- When Frank got off work today we went to explore Hot Springs National Park. The town of Hot Springs divides the park into two sections. We were able to travel up the road to both parts of the park and enjoy the views on both sides. https://www.nps.gov/hosp/index.htm

We also explored downtown Hot Springs and visited the Water Museum there. It was totally underwhelming but we were able to buy some flavored sparkling water that came from the hot springs. We also walked around the town a bit and saw some Hot Springs and watched as the water steamed.

11/9- Today was an adventure day. We had booked a time at Hot Springs Off-Road Park. It has over 1200 acres of trails from level one which is for newbies to level five which is for the hard core off-roader. We keep to the level one and two trails with most of the time spent on level two. We had a great time going up and down the trails, through mud holes, and over rocks. By the time we got done we were worn out and our Jeep was super dirty. You can check out the trail map here and follow our trek on the B and F trails. F19 Snake was the trail we spent the most time exploring. https://hotspringsoffroadpark.com/pages/trail-map

11/10- After a full day of adventure yesterday today was for relaxing. The campground we are staying at has a pair of detailers, who we had watched going around to various RVs to wash and wax and detailing them. With all our traveling our RV was pretty disgusting so we hired them to come do our RV and our very dirty Jeep. It was nice to see both sparkling again. After they were done we headed into town to the bathhouses in downtown Hot Springs. We booked time at Quapaw Baths and Spa in the public pool area. The Hot Springs water has been Carbon-14 dated at 4,000 years old and is high in silica, calcium, magnesium, free carbon dioxide, bicarbonate, and sulfate. They have four different pools with varying temperatures. The coolest was 96 and the warmest was 104. Our favorite two pools were the 98 and 102. We spent several hours soaking in the different pools and relaxing. https://www.quapawbaths.com/

11/11- Today was Veteran’s Day and Frank was off. We had planned a full day of things to do. We started off the day by exploring the Mid-American Science Museum which was full of hands-on stuff to do. We were like big kids playing with the various items throughout the Museum. It also had actual “inventions” which were used in the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. https://midamericamuseum.org/

Then it was back to downtown Hot Springs where we explored some trails including the Grand Promanade. https://www.nps.gov/places/grand-promenade.htm

We had lunch before heading back to the RV to drop off leftovers and head out to our next adventure for the day. But when we got back to the RV water was pouring out of the storage bins under the RV. We opened the door of the RV to find that our toilet had been running and had flooded the RV. The rest of the day was spent cleaning up and drying the mess.

11/12- Left Hot Springs early this morning and drove all the way back to Houston. It was 6 hour drive which is a longer drive than we normally do but we were eager to get home and see our family. We did make a couple short stops to get out and walk around a bit but we didn’t do any exploring. We pulled into Porter at a little after 5 pm and went directly to our house, which is now our daughters and son-in-law’s home that they are renting from us. We had a great time visiting and catching up and getting to see the grandkids. Our youngest one who is 8 months was not too sure how he felt about us at first but he warmed up quickly. We have a campground reserved in New Caney, Texas starting tomorrow so tonight we just parked on the street next to our house, put the bedroom slide out and slept there. Tomorrow we check into the campground we will be residing at for a few months.