Our 25th Wedding Anniversary Trip to Lake Somerville State Park

We decided to take our anniversary trip, which is in October to a Texas State Park since we have a Texas State Park Pass and have been using it all summer long for hikes and to get out in nature.

It’s 2020 and it’s been a long year with the COVID-19 pandemic. Masks and social distancing is a real ‘thing’ now. My husband has been working from home, but I’ve been a cashier for a Texas based food chain and they consider us ‘essential workers’. Good grief. We’ve been working our asses off–people are still buying way too much ‘stuff’ even now, way after the toilet paper ‘crisis’ in March 2020 when almost all businesses shut down to stop the pandemic.

We made reservations online for 5 days (because all the weekends were booked–another result of the pandemic–everyone decided to buy a camper and camp.) We booked Sunday thru Thursday night which worked for us, our anniversary was on Wednesday. It was in the Nails Creek Unit in the equestrian camping loop–the normal camping loop was still closed 3 years after Hurricane Harvey flooded and destroyed the electric to those areas. It’s a gorgeous area with trees, a lake and tons of hiking trails.

We woke up Sunday morning excited for our camping trip, packed up the camper, put the cats in their crates & loaded them in the Ram 3500, the dog happily jumped in the back too and we hooked the truck up to the horse trailer. We turned the power off from the box and tried to unhook the electrical RV cord extension from the retractable power extension hard-wired to the horse trailer and it broke. OMG. Mike looked at it and said if we stopped at Home Depot (which was on the way) he could fix it. So we were on our way.

We arrived at the Park shortly after 2pm which is check-in time and backed into our site. Mike spent the first 1/2 hour re-wiring our power cord in the 87 degree heat because we really needed our air-conditioner! Meanwhile I got the water hooked-up and all the other items unpacked. Every trip we go on, something happens or there’s an issue with the weather. We have learned to power through it or we would never go anywhere!

Soon the air conditioning was humming and the cats were happy. Our chairs were outside in the shade, and it was time for Step Two. (If you watch ‘Camping with Steve’ on YouTube, you’ll know what we mean! LOL!) We spent the rest of the day relaxing and enjoying nature by our campsite. Mike made Salmon burgers on the grill and we finally retreated inside to escape the mosquitos.

The next 4 day routine was getting up and having our green Power Shakes, going for a 5-6 mile hike with Enzo, back in time for lunch, walking to the lake to play in the water with the dog, and back to relax and dinner. The 5th day, we decided to check out another area of the park which you had to drive to because the bridge that led there was still destroyed after Hurricane Harvey. It looked gorgeous on the map with a huge lake around it and trails everywhere. We asked the ranger about it and she told us where we could park. No problem, we found the parking area and parked. It was overcast and it kept the temps down. We started off and hiked on a straight trail and headed upward to the lake that was shown on the map. The lake is actually a marshy bog. We hiked halfway around the lake and heard wild pigs squealing in the woods. We checked the map and it said if you hiked down a certain trail there was a pond where you could see Alligators. That sounded interesting so we started down that trail. We started crossing a field that had these nasty sticker seeds everywhere (Soliva Pterosperma or burweed) and we got them on our socks, shoes and on Enzo–and they hurt! We didn’t want to back-track so we kept on… the trail continued but didn’t go to a pond and all the other trails shown on the map weren’t there. Great. So we continued down that trail. I was also keeping track on my AllTrails app but my phone died, so now I was using a compass. We seemed to be going around the boggy lake but I couldn’t really tell, it was more like a dried mud area with tons of 4×4 tracks. The sun had come out and it was steamy hot in the 90s. The dog tried laying down a few times and we tried getting him to drink water, which he did. Finally we came to a dam and found the original trail around the bog. Mike commented it seemed like something from a horror movie. We were exhausted, we had blisters on our feet, and we estimated we had hiked about 7.5 miles…according to our Fitbits. We still had to hike back to the truck which was another mile or so. We decided never to do that hike again. Now we know why the bridge had never been rebuilt in the last 3 years.

Fortunately that was our final hike. Enzo wanted to go on another hike Friday morning but we decided to relax and enjoy the moment until we had to pack up and leave. Of course after we packed, hitched up and headed homeward, we got an error code message on the truck. The dreaded ‘Check Engine’ light. Seems every time we tried to accelerate up a hill, the truck would shift down, but wouldn’t pick up speed so we limped home. Fortunately this is Texas, and the hills here aren’t huge or steep. We got back to the ranch, parked the trailer and headed home. The cats weren’t happy they had to stay in their crates for another hour and Rudy complained all the way home. Good grief!

First stop the next day was the Ram dealer who told us there are ‘sub-codes’ and they would check them first. Sure enough, they were able to fix it and it wasn’t the computer or some other horribly expense part. If you googled the error code that is what came up. Which is what we initially did!

So it wound up being a good trip. We would definitely do that trip again. Perhaps in a bigger camper… hey, we can dream!