Martin Dies Jr. State Park, Texas

March 15, 2023

We left our semi-tropical campground in Louisiana, expecting to find a more barren campground in Texas. But, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the area surrounding Martin Dies Jr. State Park is much greener than other parts of Texas we saw last year. 

Spring time in eastern Texas.

We rolled into the campground on a Monday afternoon to find it quite full. There were lots of families enjoying Spring Break together with kids bike riding, playing hide and seek, and creating chalk art on the streets.  Our site had a nice water view, and the park had several walking trails to help with the process of getting ourselves back in-shape after a relaxing (but atrophy-inducing) Florida winter.

Lots of tall trees provided a nice ambiance to the campground.

Nice setting near a slough

At this campsite, the view wasn't out the back deck,.

After our arrival, we took a 2 mile walk around some camp loops to check out the beach area and other campsites.

The day use swimming area. A couple of kids came to brave the waters, even though the air temperature was only about 70.

Other views of the scenic slough that our campsite overlooked

The weather turned cooler on Tuesday (high around 60, low in the 40s). Since we had electric, we spoiled ourselves with running our little electric cube heater on low much of the time to make the camper feel like a real house. We took a couple of different walks (about 7 miles combined) off of the campground.

We had seen a bunch of wild wisteria growing in trees on our drive to the park, and we encountered some along our walk as well.

The Steinhagen Reservoir

Rick attempting to channel his inner Alan.* Fortunately, he thought the better of it and left the little island unexplored.

Being a swampy area, there were lots of little bridges to cross.

The water here had a weird coating with dust on top (pond scum maybe?) It wasn't very inviting, but it was still pretty in an odd way.

For dinner, we honored Pi-Day with a quiche...

The weather warmed a bit on Wednesday afternoon, so we took a bike ride around the park and reservoir, totaling about 18 miles.

Our ride included all the roads around the park, as well as most of the nature trails and a small island.

We hoped that this wasn't the season for hunting the public 😉

We rode quite a ways along the reservoir.

Every now and then we would find a curious "volcano" mud structure on the ground...

...We didn't think too much of them until we found an entire field of them.

Upon googling these weird things, we found out that they are crawfish "castles"! These mud structures are typically found in moist areas in northeastern Texas, among other places. And we thought that crawfish just lived in creeks and swamps.

Tomorrow we continue west across Texas.

*Alan is known to take (or at least attempt) large leaps over various crevasses.

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