Week #3: We're Texans Now!

Happy belated Thanksgiving all! We're definitely feeling very grateful and thankful to be able to travel around in our van and see all these amazing and beautiful places. We've also really enjoyed being able to visit family and friends through our travels - hopefully we can visit you soon! 

In our quest to become Texas residents, we had allowed a few days to take care of the bureaucratic hassles of getting our driver's licenses, registering our vehicle, insuring our vehicle, etc. So we were prepared to be stuck in Livingston, TX (about an hour north of Houston) for a number of days while we got all of these things sorted. Much to our delight, we learned that TX bureaucrats are much more helpful and friendly than most other places so we were able to take care of everything in a day. We did have to do a number of wild goose chases including getting our van weighed (it weighs over 8,000 lbs!) and inspected but we were very surprised to end up with TX license plates the very same day. In CA, it typically takes two months to receive your license plates. See photo below of me celebrating becoming a Texan!

With all of those things taken care of, I told Ginny there were two places on my TX bucket list - Austin and Big Bend National Park. Big Bend is all the way down at the bottom of TX on the Mexican border so we settled for a trip to Austin. My former colleague is in grad school at UT Austin so we paid her and her boyfriend a visit. They made us a delicious meal and lent us their super powered electric bikes to tool around on the next day. They were part bicycle, part Vespa scooter with super fatty tires! We visited the brand new Waterloo Park, the extensive trail network along Lady Bird Lake and rode by the capitol building too - as new Texans, we felt like we had a civic duty! I did my long run in Austin along Lady Bird Lake and up Shoal Creek - there's this super cool huge metal ball called the Observation Pod along Shoal Creek that's worth checking out if you ever visit Austin. 

After leaving Austin, we headed northwest towards New Mexico and drove through west Texas for what seemed like forever. It was wide open country with tons of windmills (and lots of wind!) and an actual tumbleweed the size of a baby bear blew across the road right in front of us! We decided to spend our first night in a hotel in Snyder, TX which was a nice break from being in the van all of the time. We decided that we would try to do that at least once a month as it's nice to have reliable hot water and a leak-proof roof over our heads! We should have hot water in our van but our inverter hasn't been working which means all of our AC power appliances, including our hot water heater, are on temporary hiatus.   

Our next destination was the Santa Fe, NM area which we planned to stay at for a number of days. It was freezing cold our first night (around 20 degrees F) but we stayed nice and toasty in the van - our morning run/walk was rather brisk though! We spent our first day in the city doing laundry, visiting the Museum of International Folk Art (see photos below) and had a tasty lunch of enchiladas and taquitos at La Choza which was super popular. We spent the night in the visitor center parking lot in the small town of White Rock which is just down the road from Los Alamos where they developed the atomic bomb. There was a grocery store and public library right across the street and there was also a water spigot so we were happy campers!  

The next day we stopped in for a brief outdoor visit with an old family friend in Espanola where I had a SIM card sent as I changed my phone plan to include unlimited data - a must for life on the road! We couldn't visit long though as they were under a strict COVID quarantine due to a number of cases in their kids' schools. We carried on to Ojo Caliente which is a legendary mineral hot spring site. They have at least six different mineral pools to soak in, each proclaiming different healing properties. My favorites were the arsenic, iron and lithia pools. They also had a mud bath which was fun and supposedly good for the skin (see photo below).  

The past two nights we spent on a secluded mesa overlooking the Rio Grande river and the beautiful snow capped peaks above Taos. There was just one other campervan on the entire mesa so we nearly had the place to ourselves. From our bed in the van, we were entertained by a herd of elk roaming the mesa across the Rio Grande. It was exactly the type of boondocking that we imagined we would be doing when we were only dreaming of living this life. We had read that the reality of living in your van is that you spend far fewer nights in places like this which has unfortunately matched our experience so far. The temperature last night dropped well below freezing (15 degrees F) which was a bit colder than we and our lithium batteries would have liked. So we're planning to head for slightly warmer destinations at least for our batteries' sake!