Day 3

Holden, LA to Stephen F. Austin State Park, TX

After a great evening at John Schneider’s Place in Holden, we got an early start and continued on our journey westward. Our next planned stop was a little west of Houston, Texas, in the Stephen F. Austin State Park. It was a somewhat exhausting drive since most of Texas appears to be a construction site! Also, I am not a fan of driving through bigger cities, even though I grew up in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, we arrived at the state park shortly after lunch.

The park is very pretty and the campsites are far apart from each other. It was rather empty while we were there, which we loved! After setting up our site, we packed up the dogs and went for a walk along a nearby nature trail to the nearby river. The whole time we could hear several owls, but unfortunately didn’t get to see them. The weather was perfect and we had a great campfire on which we barbequed our steak. Gotti loves to cook over the fire and for dessert he flambeed apples with whisky. We sat out in the dark until late, looking at the stars and contemplating the purpose of life….. We have all done that before, right?

Up again at the crack of dawn, we were ready to head out again. While breaking down our site and packing up, we noticed that there was deer poop EVERYWHERE. So, we had several deer visit us at night, but none of us heard a thing. Geez!