San Angelo State Park

San Angelo, TX

Now that we are past our solar install, we are making our way to Arizona and given the size of Texas, it will take us a few stops to get through the state. Our first stop is at San Angelo State Park, our first Texas state park camping experience. We have heard good things about camping in Texas state parks and this one has not disappointed. The sites are large and level with plenty of room between sites. We have now traveled far enough west that the landscape is very different with small trees, grassland, and cactus.

The park has a large network of hiking and biking trails. We took advantage of these to both hike and bike a couple of times. The biking was a lot of fun and occasionally challenging. When the trails were level, they had lots of ‘S’ turns and zig zagging among the small trees. Other parts of the trail, when changing elevation was necessary, were rocky and very difficult to traverse both up hill and down. Amy dismounted several times to walk her bike up or down those sections. We attempted to bike from the south section of the park to the north section on Friday morning but only made it about 2/3 of the way before we decided it was too much for a morning ride. We had a lot of fun doing this even though we did not make it to the planned destination.

We learned that this park has a lot of geocaches so we decided to give that hobby a try. We spent Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning searching for and logging geocaches around the park. We ended up logging 12 caches to get ourselves started in the world of geocaching. Yet another outdoor hobby for us to do together.

This park, like Guadalupe State Park we visited while in Spring Branch, has a birding blind for you to watch and photograph the local birds. We walked over to the viewing area with both cameras properly equipped for photographing wildlife. We saw and photographed American Kestrals, White Crowned Sparrows, White Winged Doves, Northern Mockingbirds, and a Golden-fronted Woodpecker. At least we think these are the identities of the birds we photographed. We also saw a roadrunner running down the road (what else would it be doing) but did not get a picture.

San Angelo, like San Antonio, has a river walk. It is not as large or as commercial as the one in San Antonio but it was very nice to walk on a warm sunny afternoon. We enjoyed this walk on Friday afternoon after returning from the long bike ride mentioned earlier. The walk is all setup for a nice Christmas light show but we did not want to hang around until dark to see it in all its glory.

While we were here we decided to spend a couple days practicing our boon docking skills. We disconnected from shore power on Tuesday afternoon and worked on using the water in our fresh water tank that was about half full. We stayed on our batteries and solar power for 2 and 1/2 days and when we turned the power back on Thursday evening, our batteries were at 98% charged. This is a very good sign that we can (almost) get our batteries fully recharged after an overnight and we’re doing so during the shortest days of the year.