The county park in Omaha was nice and quiet, and quite pleasant, but in the morning Tom got on the phone and called Kelderman Manufacturing, which is the company that put the original beefed up suspension on our truck when it was still a honey farm truck.  We’re still having some problems with excessive sway, and lots of bouncing if we hit a big bump, and we figure nobody will know how to fix it like the company that installed the suspension.  And, since we were within a few hours of the place, we decided it was worth a call.  The owner was super accommodating, and told us to bring it in - tomorrow!  So, instead of spending another night at Walnut Creek, we did all of our morning stuff and packed up to tick Des Moines off the list before heading to Kelderman.

It was a typical little RV park, with concrete pads and a picnic table at every site.  But it was nice, and quiet.  And, the park was built around a lake, which had a 3+ mile walking trail all the way around the lake, so we had the perfect place to walk the dogs.

When we had our walk and our breakfast and cleaned up a bit, we hit the road and headed toward Des Moines, our next capital.  As we were heading that direction on the highway, the phone rang with a call Tom needed to take, so we pulled over at the first available place which turned out to be a sort of random parking lot with this cool musical park attached.  Needless to say the stop took more time than the phone call by the time we finished playing with the percussion instruments, but it was fun.

We continued on to Des Moines, where were pleasantly surprised both by the accessibility of the capitol, and by how nice it was.  This was the first capitol we hadn’t visited on a weekend or holiday, but we still found easy parking and were able to cross streets without getting hit.  We also were surprised that it was the nicest capitol complex we had seen.  To this point, we had been most impressed with Austin, where the building was beautiful, and set in a well maintained park.  Oklahoma City was nice, but the building wasn’t as fancy as Austin, and the surrounding area was more utilitarian.  Topeka was a bit of a dump; the building was okay, but the surrounding area was a little bit of park which quickly degenerated into run down neighborhoods with abandoned houses and areas in obvious need of urban gentrification.  Lincoln was about like Oklahoma City, nice but not as impressive as Austin.  We had expected Des Moines to be more like Topeka, but we found that we were letting our stereotyping of the Midwest influence our expectations.  Instead of being run down and generic, the building itself is beautiful and under reconstruction, and the surrounding area is a very pleasant, accessible, and well maintained park, which looks like it runs all the way into the city.  And, the surrounding area is full of well maintained older buildings, and everything is clean and well kept.  

While we were in Des Moines, Tom called Kelderman to ask if they had any suggestions on where we should spend the night.  We were pleasantly surprised when he was told that we could stay at their facility, and that they had pads with water and electrical hookups!  We don’t need either, but we made our way from Des Moines to Oskaloosa, where Kelderman is located, and found that it is in a nice location out in the country, only a mile from a state park.  We are expecting a quiet night, and while Tom “supervises” the suspension work tomorrow, I’ll take the dogs for a walk to the state park.  And, if we end up having to spend a couple of days here - all good!

Dallas was a long, fun, productive, but not overly exciting stop - but exciting has a new definition after seeing dinosaur tracks.  When we were in Austin, Tom had called around to see if he could find a garage where we could get some suspension work done on the truck.  The closest he could find to Austin was in Cleburne, TX, which is actually closer to Dallas, so he scheduled a Thursday morning appointment at Quality Alignment & Brakes.  He also scheduled to pick up a new Goodyear Wrangler and have it mounted with the Goodyear Wrangler we bought in Ciudad del Carmen in Mexico, but that was in North Dallas.  It got a little complicated, but long story short, we left the Dinosaur Valley State Park on Tuesday morning, stopped at Quality to make sure our truck would fit in their doors, and headed up to North Dallas to get the new tire and visit with old family friends Ann and Jerry for the night.​

“Old” is a misused word, but in this case it probably applies.  Ann and Jerry are my parents’ age.  In fact, they were friends of my parents before I was born…and even before they or my parents were married, so that whole “glint in the eye” thing doesn’t even apply.  That’s how old “old” is here.  Over the years, they stayed more in touch with my Aunt Dot than with my mom, and Tom and I hadn’t seen them since we’d stopped by in 2016, so I had to call my cousin Biz to make sure they were still alive and kicking before I arranged a visit.  They are, and in fact they don’t seem to have aged a day since we saw them over six years ago.  We couldn’t go through Dallas without checking in, so after making sure the truck fit in the Quality garage bay (it did), and getting the new tire, we headed to their house in north Dallas.

We had an absolutely wonderful visit.  Talking to people who’ve known you since before you were born is wonderfully relaxing, and the day we spent with them went very quickly as we caught each other up on family events on both sides of the past few years, had a few great meals which I really enjoyed since they weren’t cooked by me in the camper (on top of being delicious, of course), and drank Jerry’s Manhattans, which is a drink I remember my parents drinking frequently, but which I would never mix myself.  We also caught up on our laundry, let the dogs run around in their yard, took a long walk on a greenway trail heading north out of Dallas, and got what is basically the parental seal of approval on the camper build.  We reluctantly said goodbye the next afternoon to head back to Cleburne to make sure we’d be at the shop early for the work on the camper, but not before promising to stop by when we swing back through Texas in the winter on our way to the West Coast to head up to Alaska.

We spent the next couple of nights in the Cleburne Walmart parking lot.  It definitely won’t be the best place we spent time, but it was productive.  The one day of work turned into two, which turned out to be a good thing since new shocks make the camper much more manageable on the highways at high speeds with semis zooming past.  Quality also recommended a place where we could get our oil changed, which we did.  We spent the whole day between truck appointments shopping for things we had put off buying until we were in the US, and we now both have shoes, some warmer clothes, various bits of hardware - and a television!  

On Friday, the truck work was finished and we headed back towards Dallas to see a friend we had met in Belize.  Sheryl is a birder who had visited us at Moonracer, and we’d kept in touch since we have lots of things in common - birds, dogs, conservation, living in the country, not to mention a bunch of mutual friends at this point - so we went to her house which felt so much like home to us she has no idea how close she came to having us stay for what could have been a long time, then went out for a delicious real Mexican lunch, before meeting her husband and saying goodbye (until we pass through again in the winter) before starting our trek north.

Sheryl gave us good directions to get to Oklahoma City, which was the next city on our capital quest.  We left her place before 3PM and thought we’d at least get out of Texas, but we didn’t count on the Labor Day traffic.  We worked our way north through Ft. Worth, but as we approached Denton, the next city in Texas, the traffic on the highway was so stop and go that we decided to get off and make our way on the back roads.  By this time, it was also approaching 5PM, so we looked up parks and other likely overnight places on the phone, and decided to start ticking them off as we headed north, figuring we’d be turned away from at least the first few due to weekend campers’ reservations.

The first one we tried was the Ray Roberts Lake State Park Isle du Bois Unit in Pilot Park, TX.  It’s a really nice state park, on the shore of a very pretty lake, with tons of hiking trails.  They were, in fact, full, but when Tom explained that we didn’t need any hookups, they told us to park in the car park for the primitive camping sites, which was a win/win situation since they collected a camping fee for a site they didn’t have, and we got to pay the primitive camping fee rather than the RV with hookups fee - plus we had a really nice place to stay for the night.  We walked on the trails, saw a beautiful sunset, and in the morning took the dogs for a long walk before topping off our water tanks and heading for Oklahoma City.


 

While our goals for this trip are to visit state capitals and National Parks, we’ve left ourselves open to seeing other cool things along the way.  After leaving Austin, we went to Dinosaur Valley State Park at our friend Becky’s recommendation, and saw what will quite possibly be the coolest of all the cool things we will see.

Dinosaur Valley State Park is the site of real, honest-to-goodness, 100 million plus year old dinosaur tracks.  When we were in Mexico, I read about dinosaur tracks being uncovered in Texas, and mentioned to Tom that it would be fun to see them.  But, we didn’t realize we would be passing directly by them until Becky told us, so we decided to spend a night at the state park and see not only the newly discovered tracks, but the tracks that are always there and are the reason for the park.  Our timing was perfect; August after a very dry summer is the only time many of the tracks aren’t underwater, and while you can see the tracks in the water any time, we were lucky to be able to walk all around them.  The “newly discovered” tracks aren’t actually newly discovered, but have just become visible this year because it has been very dry and the river is as low as it’s been since the 1940s, which is the last time these tracks were seen - before the days of cell phones and GPS where instant photos and mapping can happen, even if it rains the next night.

If you want to see more about the park and the history of the fossils, check out the Dinosaur Valley State Park website, or the information on this link:  https://tpwd.texas.gov/publications/pwdpubs/media/pwd_br_p4503_0094s.pdf  

We had a smooth drive from Houston to Austin, and on the way arranged to meet our friends at the Salt Lick Barbeque in Driftwood, Texas, which is southwest of Austin in the hill country.  John was a high school friend who we reconnected with a few years ago - and not through Facebook.  He was living in Georgia, and was the photographer at my Georgia sister-in-law’s brother’s wedding, and somebody made the connection that he and my brother came from the same town in NJ, and Pete realized he was in our class and gave him our contact information in Belize.  We’ve stayed in touch the past few years, so we decided to visit on our swing through Austin.​

After genuine delicious Texas barbeque, we went back to their house in Buda, which is an Austin suburb.  We spent two nights parked on their side street in a very quiet neighborhood while John and Dawn Marie introduced us to their family and gave us the ten cent Austin tour.  Austin is the capital of Texas, so we were able to check our first state capital off our list of capitals and National Parks.  Austin is a beautiful bustling city, and we visited some of the city parks along the river as well as the capitol itself.  We grabbed dinner at Whole Foods and ate in their wine bar, which probably isn’t a big deal to US residents, but after 15 years in Belize it was the height of luxury to us.

The next day we left around lunch time and drove to North Austin to meet our friend Becky.  Becky is born and bred in Texas and took us to Jack Allen’s Kitchen, which is apparently an Austin institution, but was delicious whether it’s an institution or not.  We took advantage of the relatively quiet Sunday to spend a few hours catching up.  Becky is an archeologist, and we met her in Belize shortly after we arrived there but haven’t seen her since she was last in Belize 9 years ago, so we had lots of catching up to do on both sides.  Becky asked us where we were going after Austin, and when we told her we were heading towards Dallas to visit friends but weren’t looking forward to the Texas interstate traffic, she suggested an alternate route through hill country that avoided the major highways until we were almost in Dallas.  And, she recommended a brewery that’s on Harvest Hosts for a night’s stop, as well as a visit to the Dinosaur Valley State Park which was so cool it’s going to get its own blog post.​

We said goodbye to Becky and headed for the Jester King Brewery.  That Sunday night was the first night we didn’t have a planned stop, so we had just joined Harvest Hosts that morning.  After Becky gave Jester King two thumbs up, we made reservations and headed that way on the back roads, which took a little over an hour.  We arrived at the brewery, found out where to park, settled the dogs, and headed into the open pole barn where we enjoyed a couple of flights of sample beers, and a good 3-person bluegrass group.  We spent a delightfully quiet night in their back parking lot, and in the morning took advantage of their nature trails to walk the dogs.  They’re way out in the country, so we actually saw nature on our walk - lots of birds, bugs, squirrels, and even a snake.