Dallas/ Lewisville, TX

Dallas/Lake Park campground in Lewisville, Texas

Our visit to the Dallas area was all about seeing friends -- and staying somewhere to break up a really long ride from Hot Springs to Austin.* So aside from enjoying good food and excellent times with said friends, we haven’t much to share about this part of Texas.

*Really long ride in travel trailer miles....we don’t like to go much more than 4 hours a day with our rig.

Now about Texas as a WHOLE, we noticed a few things:

Texas is BIG. We knew this intellectually of course, but experiencing it firsthand is another thing. Just sampling places we absolutely had to see, we were in Texas over a month; and there were many places (Big Bend, Guadalupe mountains to start) we’d have loved to see if it weren’t for point #2…
Summer in Texas is HOT. And we weren’t even here for real, scorching, end-of-July/dog-days-of-August summer. In early May we started to get uncomfortable, and by the middle of June we were installing additional heat-blocking measures in our trailer and planning our next stops with furnace-like heat avoidance as prerequisite numero uno.

3. Texans like their ROADS. We’ve never seen such an astonishing density of asphalt, overpasses, highway splits, “frontage” roads running alongside freeways, and unbridled construction as what we beheld in Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio. A GPS and a human co-navigator are virtually indispensable, and even then often not enough to avoid harrowing, high-speed last-minute route corrections. The busiest intersections have unique u-turn lanes, which you just have to know about or you’ll end up making a forced u-turn instead of the left turn you intended (fortunately Dorian had seen this animal before on prior trips to Dallas.) And continuing on the roads theme….

4. Texas has peculiar ROAD SIGNS. In the hill country west of Austin, we were treated to “HILL BLOCKS VIEW” and “CURVE BLOCKS VIEW” road signs -- statements of the obvious, until you consider that most of Texas is so flat, many drivers haven’t encountered situations where it’s unsafe to pass on single lane roads at 70 mph. Frequently we saw but never did learn what action was to be taken by the signage “GUARDRAIL DAMAGE AHEAD” (followed by no visible guardrail issues). We were also perplexed by what action was suggested by “FRESH OIL” signage (again, followed by no oil, fresh or otherwise). The warning sign about hitchhikers near a penitentiary was very helpful.

5. Texas has lots of FLORA and FAUNA. Something like 25% of all wildflower species in the US are found in Texas, and the roadside wildflower displays are often stunning. The variety of trees and shrubs is awesome. As for fauna, we saw armadillos, javelinas, aoudad, pronghorns, mountain goats, tarantulas, jackrabbits, snakes, lizards, frogs, alligators, scarlet summer tanagers, and whooping cranes, along with a kazillion deer, rabbits, and other waterfowl and songbirds. And grackles. Lots of grackles.

Would We Come Here Again?

I'd come to see friends but remembering the constant construction -- primarily in Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio but even in less populated areas--I'd hesitate to come back to a big city in Texas. There was one left turn in Austin that was so insanely dangerous due to bad design and an unwillingness to put in a more reasonable speed limit that it will likely stick with me for the rest of my life. In fact, that particular left turn had nothing to do with construction except that we were guided to it by Google as a means of avoiding construction elsewhere.

There's a rural and/or libertarian, laissez-faire attitude both about the seemingly unmanaged construction and people's attitude towards rules of the road. I can't help but admire the numerous truck drivers who used the full capabilities of their high clearance to cross the grassy medians of divided highways rather than go a mile or so to make a U-turn. And there's a part of me that likes the irresponsibly high speed limits. I imagine a sheriff saying to someone, "Yeah, you can go 75 here... if you want to," while implying with his eyes that the person would be an idiot to do so, but it's a free country.

Of course, Texas is a big state and broad generalizations are bound to mislead. In Corpus Christi, I heard an oil worker complain about those "blue coats coming down from Houston to look at birds." (He was complaining about this to someone whose wife had collapsed in the heat as they waited for first responders--it was a truly bizarre situation.) So, like any state with a population greater than 1, there are internal disagreements, as well.

We hope to get back to West Texas, though--the Chihuahuan Desert is beautiful. We didn't see any Chihuahuas though. Chihuauahahahahaha! I kill myself. More on West Texas later.

We stayed at Lake Park Campground in Lewisville, on the surprisingly large Lewisville Lake. The spots were close to each other, much like a private campground versus a typical state park; but the camping fee was $16 and they offered a senior discount that started at, er, my age, which made it $8 a night! Unable to resist a bargain like that, I'd absolutely camp there again. LTE signal was good, as I recall.

Would We Live Here?

We both really like West Texas. It's ruggedly beautiful. We didn't get to see Big Bend (it was 110 degrees the day we wanted to go) and the spring-fed swimming pool at Balmorhea State Park was closed for repairs, so we really want to come back to Texas generally and Trans-Pecos Texas in particular. But no, we are pretty sure we don't want to live where triple-digit temperatures are commonplace.

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