Wilderness Wandering

Southern Edition 5

April 30 – May 7, 2025

We arrived in Austin, TX to visit Tim’s college friend Rick Edwards and his wife Toni.

We learned right away that traffic is BAD in Austin! We ate an early dinner at a wonderful barbecue restaurant called County Line. I had salmon and potato salad. Tim had two kinds of meat, fries and potato salad. Rick and Toni have a beautiful home and a great back yard. We sat around and talked and went to bed. 

I had a great morning walk with Rick and Toni. We went to a Tex Mex restaurant called Chuy’s for lunch. We tried a Texas Martini – coarse salt, tequila, Cointreau, sweet and sour, orange juice and crushed ice. I loved it!

We did a little sightseeing and ended up at Amy’s to get ice cream. All four of us got amazing Mexican Vanilla ice cream with fresh strawberries mixed in. Fabulous! Tim was thinking about getting Pecan ice cream. He pronounced it pee-can. We all corrected him telling him it was puh-cun with the emphasis on the second syllable. We really started laughing when we noticed the container of pecans actually had the word spelled phonetically on it as puh-cun!!

Later we drove out to The Oasis at Lake Travis. Its a cool bar overlooking part of the Colorado River. There were many different levels with balconies so everyone could have a view of the lake.

We shared a Caribbean Breeze drink. 

When we got home, Rick made us fresh juice with their juicer. We had cucumber, celery, apple and carrot with chia seeds added. I think we need a juicer when we get home.

We were up early and departed from Rick and Toni’s heading toward Eastern Texas.

We enjoyed two State Parks Bastrop and Buescher that afternoon. As we finished the second park it began to rain, so we went to back to Bastrop (the town) to check out our first Buc-ee’s. It was impressive!

We came back to Buescher and snagged a campsite for one night. The park is very pretty. The campground is on a lake but we aren’t able to see it. Tim took a stroll and saw 5 or six deer hanging out after the rain.

The next morning I took a 3.5 mile walk on the Winding Woodland Trail. I only saw bunnies. 

Late morning we arrived in Round Top, TX, population 93. Three times per year 100,000 people invade Round Top for a huge antiques market.

I had read somewhere to get pie at Royer’s Round Top Cafe and so we got three slices. I sure could have eaten more! They didn’t last long! I also went through a few other shops. There was a gorgeous antique store. Their displays were heavenly. I almost spent $120 on a sheep fur pillow. 

Back on the road, we stopped in Burton and spent a little time at The Cotton Gin Museum. It was very interesting. I had no idea that TX is the top cotton producing state!

We stayed the night in Navasota, TX. It is known as the Blues capitol of Texas. There were some great murals depicting the important people from town.

The next morning we stopped and took a walk at Double Lakes Recreation Center. It was lovely! I dipped my feet in the lake, and walked the lake path. They had some great campsites backing up to the lake.

On a country backroad, was a super cute self service bakery. I bought some rice crispy treats. We found Woodsy Hollow RV park for the night. Tim decided he wanted pizza for dinner so we picked up a ‘za from Joe’s Italian Restaurant and took it back to the campsite. 

The next morning, I was in one of my happy places…a national park! Our first stop today was Big Thicket National Preserve. It was the first National Preserve in the NP system. 

Logging was and still is a huge business in this area which created the need for what remains of The Big Thicket to be protected.

I did two hikes in the park. The Longleaf Pine Trail from the Visitor Center was about a mile each way. The bird activity was phenomenal! The Ranger said the area is a globally important bird area and migration pathway.

The Big Thicket has four of the five known carnivorous plants.

I walked the Sundew Trail is a 1.5 mile inner and outer loop, parts are boardwalks with wildflowers, and saw three types of carnivorous plants.  

Big Thicket has alligators, but we weren’t fortunate enough to see them.

The next town was DeRidder, (population 9594). There are two attractions in downtown DeRidder and we went to see both of them. First, there is a doll museum with more than 3500 dolls. I see why some people are creeped out by them. It felt like some were staring at me!

They also have a defunct jail called The Gothic Jail.  It was built in 1914. In 1928 it was the site of a double hanging. The jail has been featured on several shows about paranormal activity.  

As we entered the town of Oberlin, we drove past The Crawfish Shack restaurant. Neither of us had tried crawfish before, so we went to dinner there. We got a sampler platter with crawfish, shrimp, red potatoes and corn.

There is definitely an art to getting the meat out of the crawfish! But, I liked them. They were too spicy for Tim. We asked the waitress if there was a place in town to get ice cream. She said they have malts. So we shared a chocolate malt.

We learned a little about the difference between Cajun and Creole. A The way it was explained to us is Cajuns are a subset of Creoles. A Cajun a person of French ancestry. Cajun came from the exiled French Canadians called Acadians, which eventually was changed to Cajun. Creoles are the local population of Louisiana, a melting pot of indigenous, black, French and Spanish. Also, the state is divided up in parishes rather than counties. While we ate dinner, the forecasted rain started and it came down HARD! 

Oberlin should have been a good stop, but it really wasn’t. Dinner was fun, but it rained so hard that in the middle of the night, the fan over the bed began to leak. So the bed was quite wet in the morning. I later found out that Oberlin received more than 5 inches of rain in 24 hours!

We checked out Chicot State Park the next morning. It was kind of foggy and mysterious looking with huge puddles from the heavy rain. Next we drove to Bunkie, LA (population 3500) because the woman Tim met last week told him Bunkie had the world’s best ice cream and they had a washateria as they call laundromats around here. We could see a lot of flooded fields and yards as we passed by.

We found the washateria and did laundry and dried our bedding. By the time we were finished the rain was letting up. We went into town and found the restaurant and they not only had ice cream, but amazing pies!!! The name of the place is Griffin’s Antiques and Main Street Market. They had amazing pie, ice cream, sandwiches and many other baked goods.  Tim had a ham and cheese croissant and a piece of coconut cream pie with vanilla ice cream. I just had pecan pie with pecan praline ice cream. But we bought the little loaves of bread and a cookie to go.  We had a very sweet server in her late 70s named Catherine.

We had a wonderful week!