Ya'll! This was an incredible stay!! If we had stayed for a week in the gravel parking lot and then come here for only a two night stay I probably would've cried.
I found this place randomly as I was looking at our route from New Mexico to Athens, TX where Josh would be training for his certification. Dinosaur Valley RV Park piqued my interest.
It was a happy thing to pull into so awesome a park after a long day of travel. We experienced our first flat tire on the trailer and thanks to Josh's awesome tech-savvy research it wasn't a blowout and thanks to God's awesome timing and protection it was an easy fix. Josh has tire pressure sensors on each of the tires for the travel trailer. The monitor annoyingly beeps every once in a while and we have to silence it. We'd almost considered turning it off. Driving down a Texas highway the sensor dings. We sigh and silence it. Then it dings again. Again, I silence it. Then it starts dinging repeatedly and I look at the sensor as the number on one of the tires drops steadily.
Me: Um, babe, is this supposed to happen?
Josh: Nope.
We pull off the nearly empty highway onto an abandoned looking side street. I spy a parking lot with an apparently vacant building with "automotive" painted on the side. Josh pulls in and a man comes out from the shop, looks at the tire, looks at Josh, and goes back inside to get his power jack and tools. Josh unloads the spare tire, the mechanic jacks up the trailer, switches out the tires, and sets it back down. It took all of ten minutes - and I was able to use the bathroom! We tried to say thank you with cash and he refused to accept it. What could have been a horrible hiccup was a minor pause and an opportunity to thank God for His protection and provision.
It had been one of our longer travel days - even without the flat tire - so it was a relief to pull up to a beautiful park with wide lanes and trees! We'd missed trees more than we realized we would having traveled the southwest for the last two months. Trees and grass and water - sigh. I am not a long-term desert-dwelling girl.
We'd also missed Duke mayo! Apparently it doesn't exist west of Texas. Josh also found this pickle juice gem and we had to stop the kids from insisting we buy some for Poppy (my dad).
This was one of my favorite parks so far. It's only a few years old. Well laid out and very clean. I ended up in conversation with the owner and told him it was almost as if he had a conversation with a 9 year old boy and asked what things would be in his ideal park and did those things - then turned to the boy's mother and asked her what would be ideal and did those things as well!
This place had a basketball court, a family pool and an adults only pool, a clubhouse, a playground, a teepee, a cedar post fort built specifically for kids to play in, a farm animal petting zoo where you could walk in any time and be surrounded by goats, miniature cows, and a pony. Running along the back of the property was a river - at just the right depth and flow to play in and explore.
And as if THAT wasn't enough...it bordered Dinosaur Valley State Park which has actual fossilized dinosaur tracks still in the river bed! It was so cool to see them still in the river and not on display in a museum. They seemed more real somehow. We learned that this area of Texas used to be the coastline of an ancient sea and that the fossil tracks were later uncovered by the winding river. Some have been excavated since being officially discovered in the 1940s but they left many there - and some are still being exposed through natural erosion from the water.
To add a cherry to the top of this decadent dessert, the weekend we arrived was the National Chili Cook-off competition and I was able to be a judge for the first round of deliberation! Sit me at a table and give me a dozen different recipes of chili to try and ask me for my opinion - um, yes please! (We also learned that "Texas Chili" is very different from what we know to be chili. You are not allowed to have any beans and there can be no visible chunks of tomato, onion, etc in a competition-level chili. Madelyn, who is always looking for the opportunity of employment, served as a runner. She brought clean spoons to tables and cleared away trash and made herself available to do whatever was needed. At the end of the weekend they collected tips and she was handed $46 and told that she is amazing. Her two favorite things - payment and praise. (The boys immediately turned to me asking for a job but I was quick to inform them that I didn't pay anywhere close to that in wages.)
We enjoyed beautiful sunsets, watching the Super Bowl (commercials), campfire dinners, new friends, adding our Texas sticker to our USA map on the back of the trailer, a gluten free bakery, and time together. This was a wonderful and restful "last stop" before our sabbatical comes to an end. I don't think I've fully processed its ending. I don't think I'm ready.
But here's to the adventure ahead!
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