Travel Blog

The Eggs are Bigger in Texas

After we left the Orlando, Florida, area we made our way over the panhandle, stopped overnight outside of Mobile, Alabama, and continued over the Gulf of Mexico to our second “home” of Livingston, Texas. 

This was our first time RVing in Texas and we were here for about five weeks. We first spent a week at the headquarters of the Escapees RV Club, then moved on to San Antonio, San Marcos, and then to Austin, Texas.

Another great stay overnight with Harvest Host at Bill-E’s Restaurant in Fairhope, Alabama. About 10 miles south of I-10. In some places you will see references to “Old 27 Grill” and that is the same place.

Texas is big, but Texas also presented some issues for us with medical care. This is the first time we have encountered issues with getting our prescriptions filled. Both of us have a medication that is considered a higher level of control than any other state. We ended up having to drive over 2 hours round trip back to Louisiana so that we could get our prescription filled by an out-of-state doctor. Even those medications that were normally very generic, and normally easy to fill elsewhere, were a nightmare at Walgreens within Texas. One more thing to know about travel into Texas, New York and California that have these stricter laws.

Livingston, Texas

Our official residence address is Bushnell, Florida, an Escapees RV Club-owned property there that handles our “legal” mail. All of our other mail goes to the Rainbow Drive, Livingston, Texas, address. We had a cool tour of the mail processing center at the headquarters building. The RV park itself is like a little community, some of it is like a traditional campground but some of it is set back in the woods and are very private little residence lots.

Livingston (population 5,600) is about one hour Northeast of Houston, Texas. (Seems like everything is an hour or more from each other in Texas!)  There is an older and a new area of town, with the major box stores in the new area.

The international headquarters of Escapees RV Club is located outside of Livingston, Texas. In this building are “home” addresses of over 11,000 RVers out on the road. Our mail is delivered here directly by the post office, the envelopes scanned and we can select to have those opened and scanned to PDF.
Site 21 at the Escapees RV Club Rainbow Park south of Livingston, Texas. Many of the sites have terraced platforms to make them near perfectly level. The park itself is on the side of a rather steep hill, so it will take some nail-biting maneuver in some places.
A typical long-term residence site at Escapees Livingston Rainbow Park. While this particular site is a really permanent thing, we would love to replicate this setup somewhere in the middle of the country as a landing place with some protection under cover. Maybe in the Knoxville area?
If you are looking for Starlink capabilities, looks like the south end of the Escapees Livingston Rainbow RV park would be a good request. This is just over from the CARES center.

Livingston was where we encountered our first Whataburger! We love their sandwiches (chicken tenders with BBQ bacon or the patty melt with jalapenos), but we could not get enough of their Dr. Pepper shakes!

It was “Dr. Pepper Shake” season at Whataburger! This was our first time being near the chain and we did verify that several locations are indeed very good!

National Museum of Funeral History

Yes, that’s right, we visited the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston, Texas! This was on our map from a “quirky” list of places to check out in the United States. Often these lists lead to a bust, but we were both pleasantly surprised by the quality of this museum and the way they address what could be a pretty morbid topic. We were there for a couple of hours checking out the various rooms and exhibits associated with the funeral industry. This museum is adjacent to the national funeral director training center.

The National Museum of Funeral Home History has a very large open space with numerous exhibit spaces off of the main room. Lots of memorial artifacts, antique hearses, and equipment from the history of the industry.
One of the most unique and memorial exhibits at the National Museum of Funeral Home History is the presidential exhibit. Artifacts from many funeral processions, all the way back to even Lincoln’s death were interesting to see.

San Antonio, Texas

There are no Aldi stores in the San Antonio area!

Medina Lake

We stayed about an hour West of San Antonio at the Thousand Trails Medina Lake campground. Getting to this campground was rough. It is set way back off of the main roads, behind residential areas with really narrow and tree-lined streets. It appears that they have purchased two or three campgrounds that were on the now-defunct Medina Lake.

There really is no lake here anymore, it was purposefully drained for irrigation downstream. The area is becoming depressed. You will see signs about water delivery because wells are drying up. You will see marinas that are hundreds of feet from water and closed restaurants and bars because there is no water for playing. The campground utilities are old and you may or may not have water at times. Fortunately, we never lost our 30-amp-only power while there.

The best grocery store in the area is directly across from Dollar General, and the Hill Country Grocery Store is about 15 minutes from the campground. Unfortunately, it was the last night we actually noticed it. They have everything that you will probably need there, you just need to be flexible on brand and options.

Medina Lake is at an all-time low point.
During our two weeks outside of San Antonio, we got a couple of soaking rains. This caused lots of dormant plants to start to pop to life.
Much of Medina Lake Thousand Trails has trees that interfere with the required northern view of the sky for Starlink. Site F39 in the lower loop was alongside the main road and still gave us south and southwest coverage from the tree canopy. However, this site is only a 30-amp service. AT&T service was very spotty, so Starlink became a necessity here.

San Antonio River Walk

In addition to the Alamo, San Antonio is best known for the river walk along the river downtown. Much of the river walk is not ADA accessible, but you can get at some of it with proper research on where the elevators are located. After we had German lunch in the cool cover of the terrace on the river we went on to enjoy a river cruise tour that took us through the downtown tourist areas. We had a very dynamic riverboat captain. She had lots of stories off-script and was great at navigating the busy river.

We just happened across the Little Rhein Prost Haus in San Antonio along the river walk. Excellent German food and live music on the river.
We had a very pleasant lunch on the San Antonio River Walk. We had a great meal on the Little Rhein Prost Haus on their terrace while listening to live music.
The narrated GO Rio Cruise was very informative and enjoyable. We had an excellent captain on our boat. This is a half-hour tour through the downtown tourist zone of the lengthy river walk. You can get on at most of the GO Rio loading areas and off at the same spot.

San Marcos, Texas

San Marcos is about an hour south of Austin and about two hours North of San Antonio, alongside Interstate 35. We even got our travel itineraries and schedules to finally align to meet up with some other full-time RVers for lunch at The Salt Lick BBQ.

Easter hit hard in Texas! We never realized how big flamingo eggs were!
Honestly, our first experience inside a Buc-ees was not the life-changing experience many proclaim!
We met up with some fellow Wisconsinites, that are also fulltime RVers, at The Salt Lick BBQ Easter weekend. You should check out Greg and Jen’s travel blog.

Treeside RV Resort

This RV resort is a pretty new campground, or at least it is under major renovation and major expansion. Unfortunately, they take “tree-side” way too seriously!  Later we determined that this would have actually worked out pretty well as a home base into Austin as well.  It is a more rural area right off of I-35.  Easy access in and out from the frontage road system, and easy delivery from the local Amazon warehouse.  Quick easy access to New Braunfels just to the North.

Treeside RV are building all new sites. Very spacious sites with very level concrete pads for your motorhome. Decent open sky for our Starlink Dishy to pull in a decent signal.
The campground is named Treeside RV for a reason??

Austin, Texas

We were in Austin so that Jason could attend a work-related conference in the city. We found the Austin Lonestar RV park on the southeast side of the city, alongside of I-35. RVing in the Austin area is very expensive with sites pushing around $100 / night. We would recommend this park for its location and quality. The only issue is the location is very urban and traffic around it is extreme no matter when you want to go out and about.

Other than for some low-hanging wires, the sites at Austin Lonestar RV were pretty spacious and had decent amenities. There were brand new, never used before, grills at each site. Also, a picnic table! We are finding picnic tables and fire rings are almost all gone from RV parks across the country.
It is always good to check your lights on the towed vehicle every time you hook up. Unfortunately, that is not really when you want to be diagnosing why you don’t have one or more lights not working! Of course, in this case, it was the ground wire on the Jeep side so nothing was working. The plastic was getting brittle on the connector anyway, so time to replace the whole thing for another couple of years of service.

Next up? Moab!