Windrose Ramblings: Texas - Road trip home

Heading Home

Before I mention that we returned home to winter, I want to tell you about a couple of highlights on the road trip home.

Poteet Country Winery

Just a few hours up the road from Port Aransas, we stopped for night at a Harvest Host, the Poteet Country Winery. Poteet region is famous for strawberry growing, and they take it seriously with a strawberry festival and competitions for best strawberries. This business specialized into turning the strawberries into wine, along with other fruit wines, including White Mustang Wine made from Texas wild grapes. These grapes really are wild and are harvested from the fence lines, not grown in vineyards.

Jim, the owner of the property, is also an avid windmill collector and restores and rebuilds them. As a result, it looked like quite a chaotic place, but it was a great spot to stay the night.

The Total Solar Eclipse

When we came to Texas at the beginning of March, we had no idea that we would find ourselves so close to the path of a total solar eclipse. Even though we now were homeward bound, we dawdled a bit in order to pass through the path at the appropriate time with no set viewing plan in place. Maybe we could find a place to pull over and watch the eclipse. Maybe the weather would be agreeable. Maybe we could avoid all the predicted traffic congestion.

As it turned out, it was a beautiful experience. Some places were charging a fee to park in their open field. Other places were charging double to camp. We saw a sign for a BBQ and thought, this might be the place. And it was wonderful.

We stopped at the Riverbend on the Frio campground and they offered pulled pork on a bun and a beautiful spot to watch the eclipse. The skies were cloudy and it was a bit of a hide and seek with the sun leading up to totality, but when it happened, the sky cleared enough that we could see and watch the world grow dark around us. What an incredible experience. For about four minutes (around 1:30 p.m.) one could look at the sun covered by the moon and when looking around, it was almost as dark as night.

As much as they tried to entice us to stay the night, we carried on down the road a bit further, as there were still many more miles to cover and it was only 2:30 in the afternoon.

Highway 83

We didn’t expect to make it a ‘thing’ but as we studied the map and asked advice in Facebook Land, following US Route 83 might be something interesting to consider. Pulling a trailer means we’re not going 70 or 80 miles an hour as freeways allow so a two-lane highway is just fine. U.S. Route 83 is a north/south highway that runs 1885 miles from Brownsville, Texas to Westhope, North Dakota. We jumped on at about Concan, Texas and continued until it crossed the I90 in South Dakota when we turned west. It was interesting to watch the changes from brush country, to hill country, to dry country, to flat land; past prairie fire burnt land in northern Texas. We faced a north headwind a lot of the time, travelling from Texas through Oklahoma and Kansas before stopping for the night in Nebraska. We stayed at a Harvest Host, Pals Brewing Company, in North Platte. It's boondocking (no services), but it's much nicer than a truck stop.

Near Canadian, Texas

Beautiful sunrise in Nebraska

Mount Rushmore

As we were passing through the Black Hills again, stopped for two nights. One day doesn’t do the area justice as you can easily spend a week exploring the hills and the various ‘tourist traps’.

Mount Rushmore is an amazing sculpture on the mountain. The skill and talent of Gutzon Borglum and his team was incredible. It took about 16 years until completion in 1941. The sculpture's roughly 60 ft. high depicting the faces of presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

This is in the museum to illustrate how they worked on the sculpture.

We spent a good part of the day driving around the area, enjoying the Black Hills and the various vistas, ending with a swim in Hot Springs at Evan's Plunge, a natural mineral pool.

How can this tree even grow here?

And the miles continued on. It was wonderful to again stop in with our friends in Coaldale and join in their family dinner. We'd come full circle and the next day arrived home safely.