boondocking & sweet Balmorhea
[SIDE NOTE: I'm trying to NOT duplicate pictures I'm sharing on social media here on the blog. if you don't follow me on Instagram, Instagram is my favorite (also fun snippets of our day on insta-stories). AND I went live on our Facebook Page this week to give you all a tour of the camper! if you haven't seen that yet, check it out! lastly, if you don't want to miss what we share here on the blog, get on the list at the end of this post. LOVE YA]
between Garner and Balmorhea State Parks, we boondocked for a night (and met up with my parents one last time, ALL THE FEELS).
boondocking is a loose term that essentially means camping without hookups, or dry camping. in Junction, TX there is a city park where it is free to boondock. this was our first time. we cooked and heated the camper with propane, and we have a house battery that runs lights and our water pump. water heater runs on propane too.
SO we left Garner with a full water tank and fully charged electronics and set out.
we LOVED this. the coolest part of boondocking is that you can literally park anywhere… right next to the water or in the trees… right where the beauty is.
every second of the one day/night we spent there was full. my parents were there (drove from Austin, bless them) when we got there and picked up right where they left off with the kids. park play, fishing, collecting and cracking pecans and sharing dinner together. this day filled me up. now I was ready to go.
on to Balmorhea State Park. it was SO WINDY. Ben wrote in his blog about driving into the wind, but there were wind gusts our first night here that actually had us worried our camper would flip over! the wind was so loud and the camper shook. it was a long night.
our regular bike rides.
mostly though, I thought this place was really beautiful. it was too cold and windy most of the time to do anything more than walk/bike around the campground. although we did hit the natural springs pool on our one warm day, and visited the city of Balmorhea’s little public library and a local business, the Rock Shop. we got lucky here, as the owners weren’t busy and were very happy to have interested eyes. they took us on an entire shop tour, showed us rock cutting equipment, rock cleaning equipment and doted on the kids.
from Balmorhea, the original plan was to head north to Carlsbad. but instead we went West to El Paso for shopping, and into New Mexico to an RV Park in Las Cruces where we could do laundry and take a day trip to White Sands.
opened the door one morning to this.
I’m not sure I had any expectations about how quickly we would move. we’re finding weather to play a big part in our plans, since it is January. also we’re finding that after 3 nights we’ve been mostly ready to keep going. suppose we’re just still excited to be on the road.
you guys, we live in our camper. ;)
xo
KG
