We Broke One of Our Rules . . .

One of our cardinal rules is to always arrive at a campground early in the day. That allows us to find a good site, and get backed in and hooked up easily and unhurriedly. After two years of following the rule very well, this time we blew it! We went to Sunday morning services at the closest church to Lake Arrowhead state park. When the service went longer than we expected, we got on the road late. It's a good thing we didn't take them up on their invitation to stay for the pot luck lunch, or we would have been even later! The combination of a late start with a longer than usual drive, saw us pulling into our next destination--Inks Lake State Park--as the sun was setting.

We like Texas state parks a lot, and we especially like the way they handle camp site assignments. Full-time RVer like us can show up early in the week and take their pick of the available sites. In the month of December, in a huge campground like Inks Lake, that meant that we had our choice of over 100 sites. Normally, we would spend thirty minutes driving through the campgrounds to find the perfect spot. But as the sun was setting, we just followed the ranger's first selection for us.  But that site was not level, and had low-hanging trees. So we were driving in the dusk looking for an alternative site.

We finally chose one nearby, and Mark had the very difficult and risky job of backing the motor home into a narrow site in the dark. We even had to take the time to add leveling blocks as it got darker. We found this was a messy job, as we hadn't noticed in the dark that this campsite was covered with goose poop. Just to make things worse, now it started raining. So we were outside in the rain, trying to dodge the rain drops and the goose poop. To add injury to insult, the water connection was leaking and one leg of the 50-amp electric connection was not working. As one thing after the other piled up, we vowed never again to break our rule of getting to a new campground early in the day!

We hope you're not too disappointed that this blog doesn't have any photographs. If you think about pictures of goose poop in the dark, you realize that our situation wasn't very picturesque.

It rained all night, and most of the next day. As we looked out of our rain-streaked front window, we watched those dang geese cavorting happily in the rain. Inks Lake was quickly becoming one of our least favorite state parks. But two maintenance guys showed up immediately after we reported the water and electricity problems the next morning. With good power and water, we are now comfortable in our new home. We understand that our bad first impression of this park was our fault because we broke one of our rules. Now, we are anxious to see why Inks Lake State Park is so popular with so many people.