Skip to main content

The Texas Hill Country, Part I

In the late morning we drove back up Mustang Island to the town of Port Aransas and took the ferry to the mainland for the second time that day, since we’d gone across just after dawn to make it to an appointment for an oil change. Coming across to Aransas Pass, we saw a whole flock of cormorants sitting on a ferry piling, and I learned that a flock of cormorants is called a “gulp.”


A gulp of cormorants in Aransas Pass

Then we headed north–northwest, passing through the ranch towns of Taft and Sinton, which were named for Cincinnatians William Howard Taft and his father-in-law, David Sinton. They had both tried their hands at Texas cattle ranching in the early 20th century. I am guessing that they weren’t exactly hands-on ranchers, but they did visit their respective ranches to see how things were going. The town of Taft is a small place; I missed the “Welcome to Taft” sign so I had to settle for a photo of Taft Donuts. Every little town in Texas has at least one donut shop.


Taft Donuts, in Taft, Texas. I do not think
President Taft ever visited the donut shop, but--maybe?

Sinton is a larger place; it’s about three times as big as Taft, which is just the opposite of William Howard Taft and David Sinton themselves. We skirted Sinton and went on to Beeville, which is not named after flying insects, but after Barnard Bee, who served in the cabinet of the Republic of Texas. It seemed like a pleasant enough town, although it has an odd footnote in history. It’s the place where the last American chattel slave was freed, almost 100 years after the end of the Civil War—Alfred Irving was freed in 1942. Pretty crazy.

From Beeville, which does have a beehive on all its signs, even though it isn’t named for bees per se, we easily found the east–west road we were looking for to take us over to I-37, which led us to the outskirts of San Antonio. We stayed at a motel on the outer ring road of San Antonio, to map out a path through the Texas Hill Country. We didn’t see the Alamo or the Riverwalk. Maybe another time. The next morning we took Texas 16 through towns with great names like Helotes and Bandera and Utopia. Around Pipe Creek, a wide spot in the road, we stopped at Snowflake Donuts for a mid-morning repast (every town in Texas, no matter how small, really does have a donut shop), then on to our destination, Garner State Park.

   
The Frio River runs through Garner State Park in the Hill Country

   
In some places the Frio River has water, in other places, not so much

Garner was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, and there’s a big dance hall pavilion that is still sometimes used for dances—but mostly it seems to house a few shops for summer visitors, including a restaurant and an ice cream place. The pavilion overlooks the Rio Frio, which winds through the park.

    
The overlook and dance pavilion in Garner State Park
was built by CCC workers in the 1930s

We walked down to the river in various places, and it does seem to live up to its name—it’s a cold river, but there were people tubing, kayaking, and paddleboarding. Air temperatures were in the mid-80s, so it was swimming weather, but that water was still darn cold.


Mike at the Rio Frio

That night was the first really warm night on this trip; although it hasn’t been super cold at night since January, the temperature definitely drops as the sun goes down when you are on the Gulf coast. At Garner in the Hill Country, it stayed in the low 80s well after dark, and I enjoyed walking around in the dark, looking at the sky full of stars and checking out the star map at the visitors’ center. There were also a lots of stands of prickly pear cactus, which were interesting to look at but definitely you want to avoid them when walking around at night.


Prickly pear cactus abounds in Garner State Park

The next morning, we headed northeast into the part of the Hill Country that was settled by German pioneers, and I am told, is still quite German. Looking forward to some schnitzel!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Waterways and Wetlands of Western Ohio

  Though we are still not technically on the road for awhile, it’s spring in the Midwest and we are occasionally getting out to see some sites nearby. Last week we had a sunny, warm day that followed many days of rain, so we decided to head out somewhere to hike where there were boardwalks—or at least solid rock paths. We started at Charleston Falls, near Tipp City. The preserve was far more crowded than usual; the warm weather after a long winter apparently brought out the crowds, especially homeschooled kids and their families. We took the path less traveled back through prairie meadows (only slightly mushy) to the top of the falls, then wandered down the stone paths to the bottom of the falls. There was water going over the falls, though not a lot. The falls are fed by small underground springs several miles to the east, and the stream creating the falls plummets almost 40' as it flows to the Great Miami River, one mile to the west.  Charleston Falls Preserve in western O...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Great Platte River Road . . . and Big Rocks

The North Platte River runs the entire length of Nebraska, almost right through the center of the state. It’s a braided stream, a river or stream with many intertwined channels separated by islands or sandbars, so it looks somewhat like the strands of a braid. The folks heading west followed the main channel of the river, where there was grass for the oxen and mules, water for everyone, and fairly flat going. The government built Fort Kearny along the North Platte fairly early—1848, my guidebook tells me—to help protect the travelers along the Oregon and California Trails. Fun fact, both of those were the same trail until far western Wyoming, and they were on the south side of the river. When the Mormons started heading west to Salt Lake City, they walked with handcarts along a trail on the north side of the river, a route that was called the Mormon Trail, and met up with the other two trails around what’s now the border of Nebraska and Wyoming. North Platte River in Nebraska The tow...
Post a Comment
Read more

Living with the Chill, Waiting for the Warm Up

 The Coastal Bend area of the Texas Coast is known as a birder’s paradise, and we have seen some pretty cool specimens, up close, including roseate spoonbills and brown pelicans and willets. This heron believes that he owns the wharf down at the harbor park in Port Aransas. He clearly is accustomed to posing for photos. Harry the Heron surveys his domain There’s also a tower to climb at the harbor park, giving you a good view of the waterway called Aransas Pass, where the ferry crosses to the mainland, and some of the huge ships that go through the pass. We often see dolphins in the water up there, but they are very tricky to photograph. The circle on the photo below shows a dolphin fin just popping up out of the water. This one stayed for quite awhile until we left to get a seafood dinner at Grumbles on the other side of the harbor. After dinner we drove around to the University of Texas maritime research facility and then past that, to the beach road which is amazingly well maint...
1 comment
Read more