Tearing through Texas

Heading west, we left Louisiana and drove towards Texas. One of our first stops was another Harvest Hosts location – Bernhardt Winery, west of Conroe, TX. We had a beautiful campsite all to ourselves and as usual purchased a bottle of the host’s wine to enjoy that evening. If I haven’t convinced you yet how wonderful Harvest Hosts is, maybe these pictures will do the trick.

Our next stop was Austin, which we were excited about since neither of us had ever been there. We stayed at McKinney Falls State Park, which was just south of the city. We only had two days to explore the area, which really wasn’t enough time but we gave it our best shot. High on my to-do list was to eat lots of good Tex-Mex, and the food did not disappoint. We had excellent meals at Trudy’s, Chuy’s, and Curra’s. And I got to have dinner one night with my good college friend Eric, who I haven’t seen in about 15 years!

Austin has a very nice walking trail downtown along the Colorado River, and we took the dogs there for a nice long walk one morning.

I mentioned in my last post how we had taken this route this year in order to avoid the crazy spring weather that chased us across Texas last year. Well, even though we didn’t have to run from tornadoes this year, we still had a crazy weather experience, this time in the form of a hail storm. Luckily it didn’t last very long and didn’t do any damage, but it was very noisy and crazy to watch!

One nice surprise of our visit to Austin was that the Texas Bluebonnets were all in full bloom. Anytime we saw a big patch of Bluebonnets, we saw carloads of people pulled over and outside of their cars taking pictures. There was a lovely large field of these iconic flowers right inside the park.

Moving on from Austin we next headed to Abilene State Park. It was another nice, quiet Texas state park. Nothing terribly exciting about, until Deas discovered on Yelp that there was a famous Texas steakhouse right down the road. Even though we’d completely stuffed our faces in Austin, we decided we had to find a little bit more room in our stomachs to enjoy Perini Ranch Steakhouse. You know you’re at a Texas steakhouse when you see both an oil well and a giant Armadillo on the property! As promised, the steaks were incredible and we left with very full and satisfied tummies.

Our last Texas stop was thanks to Harvests Hosts again – this time Caprock Winery south of Lubbock. Our parking spot wasn’t as picturesque as last time, but the grounds in general were very pretty and quiet. We bought two bottles of their wine, had a good night’s sleep, and in the morning headed for New Mexico.