Colorado City State Park and home

Thursday, March 18 2021 

bye, La Vista:

On this day we traveled to Colorado City State Park. Happy to be back in a state park--with room to roam, I promised Molly a good long jog. We got almost a full hour of slow jogging, but with a whole lot of stopping for smells.

But first there was the getting there. The route that Google had proposed involved FMs, and I try to avoid FMs. So when choosing between two alternate routes, I checked them both and somehow decided that the middle one did not have any FMs. Nor did it have any Ranch Roads. FMs can be good and they can be bad, but Ranch Roads are not for the foolhardy or the drivers of RVs. However I would point out that the Ranch Road we took up to the Davis Mountains the previous day had been very nice. For a car--not a 32-foot RV towing a car.

Anyway, the route I chose was to take US 67 north and then head up to I-10, take it a little ways east and then proceed north again to I-20. But as soon as we started off north from I-10, instead of going directly north on TX-18, stupid Google took us on FM 1053 up to somewhere in the arid desert until we ended up on TX-329 and went over to Crane. So we ended up on an FM despite my plans.

When we finally got on US-385 north from Crane, we found it a great road--a four-lane divided highway with almost no turns. Soon we started seeing oil pumps all over and knew we were nearing Odessa. In future, note that 385, even though it's a little out of the way at the southern end, is a better route.

Colorado City state park was very nice. The sites are open, so you can see every thing your neighbors are doing. Which you don't especially want to see when what they're doing is driving on the grass to make an unnecessary U-Turn to get into their campsite,  then backing into their site by cutting their truck tires into the dirt beside the gravel road, thereby obliterating the ground squirrel burrows there. I hope the squirrels had a back door.

(Later I checked--the burrows were a little farther off the road so they were safe)

The park is ideally located to be a one or two-night stop on the way from home to out west somewhere. But, sadly, it seems to fill up really fast on weekends. I originally reserved Friday night at site 118, which is a pull-through site. But then when I changed the reservation, 118 was full so I had to reserve the site next door, which was a back-in site. No big deal, but being able to leave the Jeep hooked up would have saved us twenty minutes in the morning.

Add to map: 19, 21 and 25 are good sites.

The lake was small and fairly low, so I doubt if we'd ever want to take the boat there. There wasn't much in the way of bird life, but there might have been foxes about--plenty of ground squirrels for them to eat. On our jog, Molly and I went through the campsites (a lot of them) to a little fishing pier, then around on the road a long way, almost to the boat launch. There were cabins out there, too.

Friday Mar 20?
On to home. Nice boring drive--I have no notes about it, good or bad.

NOTES
1. When planning routes, be especially aggressive about eliminating FMs.
2. I really need a dripping water feature in my bird bath.
3. Strongly avoid private campgrounds. Except possibly the expensive ones.