Mineral Wells Fossil Park

May 29, 2022May 28, 2022 — Nature, Travel — 3 min read

Situated to the west of the Texas town of Mineral Wells is a very unique park where you can collect fossils that lived in the bottom of a sea some 300 million years ago. We spent time here a year ago and she who never passes up an opportunity to explore rocks and fossils planned our trip so we would be visiting again this year.

A sign tells of the different types of fossils that that can be found at the site.

The collecting area is the former borrow pit of a now closed city landfill. It can be really hot down there so we try to arrive in the morning just after the gates open and besides a bag or two to put our finds in, we also wear camelbacks which really help to keep us hydrated.

Rains erode the banks of the pit exposing and carrying the small fossils along with the runoff, meaning most anywhere you look there is likely to a fossil, though the best places to look in our experience are near the bottom of the banks.

I took this photo of a section of a crinoid stem just a few feet from where the chain leading down to the bottom of the pit ended. While she and I grew up in the same state near the Great lakes, it was in opposite ends of the state. Yet we both had collected crinoid stems as kids, along with other fossils and arrowheads. No wonder we have been so compatible for so many decades. How can a guy go wrong if he marries one of the smartest and prettiest girls in her high school class. Lucky Rob.

There is more than than fossils in the old borrow pit. Flower names are not my forté, so this one shall be named a low growing purple flower with a yellow center. A botanicalist I isn’t.

After almost two hours of constantly bending over and and scanning the ground, we decided it was time to make the long drive back to the RV park. But she who sees everything rock and fossil wise asked if I saw the rock art in the borrow pit. That meant I had to climb up the bank and take this photo. Just goes to prove that not everyone who comes here spends all their time collecting fossils. And yes, before we left she had to add some rocks a nd fossils to the rock art

Toothpick and dime to provide scale. And before you comment, “You spent two hours here and that is all you found!” understand that we didn’t collect 1/1000 of the fossils we saw. By the way this is what I collected, but hers was similar in quantity. The relative size of the fossils are apparent from the toothpick and the dime. We had a contest as to who could find the smallest brachiopod. I figured out the smaller and lighter fossils would be carried further by the runoff, so I searched further out in the pit. The smallest ones are in the two rows between the toothpick and dime. The largest is above the dime and had a mostly complete bottom shell and half of the top shell. It is days like this that make Life so worth living.

A $40 a Night RV (Caravan) Park

May 28, 2022May 28, 2022 — Travel — 1 min read

There was gravel and dirt with a small small piece of artificial turf (likely from the local high school football field when new artificial turf was installed) at the last RV park we stayed at. This park has grass and space galore. The jar on the concrete is solar tea. A quart jar filled with water, tea bags and sun is all it takes. She buys loose tea and tea bags, then she fills the tea bags with just the right amount of tea to let the sun do its thing resulting in perfectly smooth, delicious tea.

No comparison to the last RV park we stayed at. Large pull thru sites, multiple locations for showers and laundries, however the wifi is TengoInternet which we have had at other parks and it seems is never all that good. Luckily we have our own internet and it works very well. The real downside to this park? It is some 20 miles from what we do when we are in this area. Price and value are certainly two different things when it comes to RV parks.

A $35 a Night RV (Caravan) Park

May 27, 2022May 28, 2022 — Travel — 2 min read

Many people would say this is “not the ideal RV (caravan) site. It’s bounded on two sides by park roads, one the main entrance road, and the site is absolutely tiny. We are only here when we are not out and about. We bought Sophie for the spacious rear lounge so we could be inside when the weather wasn’t to our liking. Bottom line, it is home for a few days and suits us just fine.

Why we decided to downsize from a big diesel pusher RV to 25 foot (7.5 meters) Sophie. No problem fitting in any site anywhere. A little bigger and we wouldn’t have been able to stay here, we would have been too long for the site.

They only have 2 sites available for transients, which is what we are, all the other sites are for long term residents. So why did we stay here rather than the nicer park further out of town? 1. We like to be close to the places we are going to visit. 2. We really don’t care that much what the RV park is like. 3. Since most of our time at an RV park is spent inside Sophie so park amenities are not that important to us. (Over the years we have stayed at parks that would make this one look like a high end resort in comparison.)

Just a few thing that make this park what it is, Not shown is the pickup truck parked beside a park road that has a flat tire with the truck bed full of junk. While it’s not a park for everyone, we would stay here the next time we are again visiting Dripping Springs.

Pig Pen BBQ

May 26, 2022May 25, 2022 — Food — 2 min read

An awesome BBQ joint in Dripping Springs, Texas

From the outside it sure doesn’t look like much, and it wasn’t all that easy to find the door. Our experience is that those BBQ places that have spiffy new buildings are places we eat at only once. Pig Pen BBQ actually started life as a food truck that grew so popular they had to acquire a building.

**Much of the décor is reclaimed sheet metal**

Everybody has her or his vice. Mine issues forth from the bright red dispenser. I simply have to have Dr. Pepper with my BBQ and it sure isn’t that diet stuff.

pork and beans — **She had a pork sandwich with charro beans**

I opted for a pork sandwich with a side of corn casserole. (The jalapeno was from her charro beans). Think chewy corn, finely diced tomatoes? and a cream sauce with some other ingredients that I couldn’t begin to guess what they were, all of which that made for the best corn dish outside of my wife’s scalloped corn that I have tasted. And we both agreed the huge mound of pork inside the bun was as good as it gets. It was so good neither one of us added any extra BBQ sauce to it. Next time we are in Dripping Springs we will be back here. Gotta try some of their other meats you know.

A Band (Group) of Javelinas

May 25, 2022May 23, 2022 — Eclectic — 1 min read

Video from one of our security cameras at our RV lot.

No more javelinas rooting around in our back yard since we fully enclosed it. Now they have to stay in the greenspace behind our lot. Before they would just come up on this side of the green space fence as ours and the lots around us had no backyard fences. Now we are the middle lot in five consecutive lots that have completely fenced backyards.