Texas Thousand Trails Preserves

Left Wisconsin after my son's wedding in early October.  Just in time as the weather was getting extremely cold.  Any longer and I would have needed to winterize my RV.  Stayed a couple of weeks near Norman, OK at Lake Thunderbird State Park to visit with family in the area.  I stayed at the south side of the lake in the Turkey Run section and all sites had a new concrete slab for $25 a night.  If over 62 you get $2 off a night.

This is my RV at Lake Thunderbird with my hanging chair under the awning.  I will submit a post later describing the chair.

I have had to pay for camping all summer except when I was at my brother's lot and it has been adding up.  I was looking forward to getting to Texas and Thousand Trails Preserves where I camp for free.  Finally on October 24 I headed for Texas.



The first Thousand Trails Preserve I visited was Lake Texoma.  Was I ever disappointed.  Almost all sites were either seasonal rentals or set aside for seasonal rentals.  I had not been to a Thousand Trails Preserve since 2009 and that was in Oregon.  I knew they had started offering a limited number of seasonal sites at that time but there were not too many yet.  There were only a few sites available here and they were not very good.  It didn't help that it was just before the Halloween weekend celebration so there were a lot of campers coming in.  I took a site that was not ideal but at least it was a full hookup site so I was happy to get it.

Everything is brown here in Texas.  Guess they did not have much rain this summer.  This is my first time in Texas so I don't know if this is normal or not but I would guess it is not.  All of the lakes and rivers I have seen are very low.  Lots of boat ramps are closed because the ramps are no longer in the lakes.

Anyway, I spent 3 weeks here free of charge at least.  After the first weekend, everyone left and I felt like I was camped in an RV storage yard.  Lots of RVs, no people.

I did meet and talked for a long time with a woman in the adult center and she told me this was the worst of the Thousand Trail Preserves in Texas.  Apparently the others do not have so many seasonal sites.  That made me feel a little better.  I had purchased a VIP membership in Thousand Trails looking ahead to using them after I had retired.  I took a chance on them based on facts I had available at the time and in effect prepaying for my camping.  I can stay 3 weeks at each preserve and then move on to the next one with no time out.  So, for instance, I will be staying in Texas all winter and will not pay much of anything for camping.  I will be paying for maybe two days because some of the preserves are too far apart.  I like to keep my driving to 150 miles or less so I will overnight at other campgrounds a couple of times.

Leaving Lake Texoma, I moved on to Bay Landing.  Here I found lots of sites fortunately.  So many sites in fact, it was hard to pick one.  There were very few full hookup sites and they were all taken so I ended up with a water and electric site.  Not really a problem as I had that all summer in Wisconsin.  I can easily go one week on one tank of fresh water and dumping once.  Since I was only going to be here 2 weeks I just needed to drive to the dump station once.

These were pretty nice sites with lots of space and a concrete pad for the table.  Not very many trees however.  Since the temps only got up around 70 each day, the sun felt good.  I don't think I would want to be here in the summer though.

I was feeling much better about my future camping plans at this point.  My daily newspaper was placed on my picnic table every morning unlike the last place where when I did get one it was thrown on the ground somewhere.

There were lots of ATV trails and roads to walk here so I did quite a bit of walking.  All flat though so it was not much exercise.

Different vegetation here.  Of course after living in Oregon most of my life, I have not seen cactus plants much.

After two weeks in Bay Landing we come to the present time.  I pulled in to Whitney Lake last Wednesday and it is a great place to camp.  Lots of sites to choose from and most of them are full hookups.  A lot of them would have been just fine so I just took a convenient one when I found a place to pull over and unhook the car.  This whole section has WiFi so I do not need to go to whatever building has WiFi access.  My laptop works okay but my iPad has problems. It doesn't seem to be very good at picking up a signal.  It is the original iPad so hopefully Apple has improved on that with the more recent ones.

 This site has lots of trees as do all in this section which makes it seem more private.

There is no one close by me so I feel as if I have the place to myself.

My picnic table has an open knothole which makes a convenient place to put my solar light.

My morning paper had a sample coffee packet in it. Kind of a problem as I don't drink coffee.  I will try to catch them tomorrow morning when they bring the paper and return it and ask them  not to waste anymore coffee on me.

I think I am going to enjoy my next 3 weeks here. Full hookup, WiFi, morning paper and lots of peace and quiet.  Ahhh.....Life is Good.