Abilene State Park

Once I flew back from visiting Mallory in Boulder, we had two days to clean the house and prep the RV for its next big adventure.  There’s meal planning (keeping everyone well fed is key to happiness all around), grocery shopping, cooking for the freezer, restocking linens and cleaning products and other items that we’ll need, packing clothes and toiletries, loading up on dog food and supplies – I’m a natural list maker as it is so this is really in my wheelhouse.  Lists!  Checkmarks! Type A organization!  Yay!

The new adventure was to go back to Boulder and pick Mallory up for her Spring Break, but taking our time and seeing sights along the route up there.  This way she gets to see first-hand how nuts Dave and I actually are by coming home to Austin in the RV, but I’m not Cruella DeVille.  I bought her a plane ticket back to school when Spring Break is over.  Our first stop is Abilene State Park.  Woo hoo!  Abilene baby! What the heck is in Abilene?  We have no idea! We clipped Maiya into her new harness to start our trip and before we even left the neighborhood she’d already managed to wriggle around and get caught in it.  Have I mentioned a dozen times that this is all a learning process?  It’s the journey that counts, not the destination, right?  Abilene, baby!

I’ve had a few people ask me why we stop the places we do on these trips and the honest answer is that the dogs can only go for so long in the moving RV before things start to get dicey.  And by things I mean I start hyperventilating worrying about their comfort level because I’m a freaky dog mom that way.  We can go about two hours before we need to stop and walk and water everyone (at this point), and then about two to three hours more and then our day is just about through.  If Google Maps says it’s a four and a half hour trip, we can count on it being closer to six.  Not only do we stop for dogs but we can’t always go the full speed limit in this hotel on wheels.  Hey! Now we’re the annoying RV on the two lane highway that people want to pass at the first opportunity!

A few hours into the drive, Dave had an informative and unscheduled lesson in how to keep a very tall RV on the road in gale force winds when we ran into an area with the worst wind advisory that Texas has seen in a long time.  I saw videos later of semis being blown over like toys and whoo boy.  So glad I don’t check social media or news very often.  I don’t think anyone has been as glad to see Abilene as we were that day. Abilene, baby!

We stopped right before hitting the campground to let the dogs run around Camp Barkeley, an off leash dog park we found on Google but it was just fenced in dirt and still super windy so we didn’t stay long.  We got to our slot, plugged in, nd heated up a casserole that I’d prepped at home because having to cook on long travel days is the pits.

There was a little path called Eagle Trail right near our site that we were able to let the dogs go without leashes, and they had a blast sniffing all the latest news in this cool new place.  Abilene has had a lot of rain so we didn’t go the whole length of the trail because there were so many huge puddles and washing muddy dogs after that stressful day on the road didn’t sound appealing in the least.

I don’t have any pictures of our first day in Abilene because we were exhausted and stressed by the time we got there and I’m thinking that no one would miss one more photo of the dogs lying in the pen.  But don’t worry – more pictures of dogs lying in the pen are coming!  We aren’t getting to do too much so far and the pictures reflect that.  Told you I’d share what we’re doing – and this is what we’re doing.  Not much more than getting to know how all this works.

The first night in Abilene I had a terrible case of insomnia, which happens now and then, and my brain is so weird that I just have to share what it is that keeps me awake.  I give you, my brain in the wee hours of the night:

We have grape tomatoes in the cupboard.  I wonder if they’re getting mushy?  Should I have had those with dinner tonight so they don’t go bad?  How long does it take for tomatoes to go mushy?  Do tomatoes go with casserole?  Does it matter? We’re in an RV for God’s sake, I think the ship has sailed on what foods go together.

I’d love to take the dogs back to Eagle Trail tomorrow since they had such a good time.  How weird am I that I want to make sure the dogs have a good time?  What are the chances that the trail would have dried by tomorrow?  That much water can’t evaporate that fast, can it?  How fast does water evaporate anyway?  Did I learn that in middle school science?

Grit channel was showing a movie called The Lone Hand and wouldn’t you know James Arness was the bad guy.  That’s weird because I always think of him as the good guy in Gunsmoke. My dad used to watch Gunsmoke.  He loved it.  Of course in The Lone Hand he went by Jim Arness and then James for Gunsmoke.  I wonder if his agent thought he’d get more parts if he switched from Jim to James?  Or maybe he’s one of those stars from the 1940s and 50s who changed his name from like Ira Goldstein.  I’d pick James over Ira too.

Speaking of those tomatoes, I brought some key lime pie yogurt from home to eat because it was getting close to the expiration date.  I should eat that for breakfast tomorrow.  I love key lime pie.  So does Mallory.  She orders it any time we go out for dinner and they have it.  My mom loved key lime pie too.  Nothing chocolate though.  My mom didn’t like chocolate which made her seem like an alien to me when I was a kid.  Who doesn’t like chocolate?

So, yeah.  My brain decides to ponder the most irrelevant crap it can think of in the wee hours of the morning.  That’s when I decided to take a sleep aid the following night to shut it up.  Better living through pharmaceuticals, I always say!