Thursday, March 7, 2019
Traveling west and out of the predicted severe weather area that the National Weather service had published seemed the better part of valor. Call us coward if you will but we’ve been a few hours away from some towns devastated by tornadoes, which is too close for us. We picked up, packed up and jacks up and were out the door, so to speak, on our way to the Dallas, TX area before 8am on Wednesday. Interstate 20 will take us to the Dallas area then a series of jukes up to Lewisville where we’ll spend a couple of nights at the Lake Park Campground, just a part of the City of Lewisville’s huge Parks and Recreation complex located on the shore of Lewis Lake.
The ride west on I-20 was great. Good scenery with lots of trees with many of them leafing out and not much wet bayou type country. The interstate avoids most towns and skirt two major Texas cities, Tyler (104,000 souls) and Longview (81,000 souls). Tyler is known as the Rose City for its rose production. In fact it has the largest rose garden in the United States.
Traffic is pretty light until we reach the outskirts of Dallas. Our destination is north of the city so we have to do our best to skirt the megalopolis. Well, that didn’t happen. Everyone else had the same idea. Traffic is heavy on US 80, I-635 and I-35. US 80 and I-635 were meant to provide a means around city center. Traffic accidents on both sides of the highway slow traffic even more. In fact, like other bypass sections of interstates, they instead allow the city to sprawl. We’ve been fortunate thus far to have avoided heavy traffic. So to say the last 40 miles of our journey was unsettling is an understatement.
We chose to stay in a location half way between two points of interest- senior housing developments, one in Denton which is located on the west shore of Lewis Lake, and one on the east shore of Lewis Lake located in Frisco. Lake Park Campground, a City of Lewisville (106,000 souls) venue, is smack dab in the middle of them and that’s where we stay.
The campground is only one aspect of the entire park. Located on the large 29,000 acre Lewis Lake it has a boat launch, a large picnic area, several large lighted baseball fields and soccer fields. It appears that some ball fields and the soccer fields are in the process of receiving light so they can have games after dark. There is lots of room for us to roam with the doggies and that is what we prefer.
Anyhow, after we checked into the park office we take several minutes to set up in our site for two nights. Leveling jacks go down, room slides go out. As the last slide goes out this god awful very loud noise just about has me jump out of my skin. We’d been having a little problem with one of our slide rooms balking so I initially thought that the slide hydraulics were blowing up as I had my finger on the button that controlled that particular slide rooms movement! Or something like that. But the noise was very loud and seemed to be coming from outside. I went outside and yep, that’s were the very loud noise was coming from.
It was so loud I couldn’t triangulate where the source was located. The noise stopped less than two minutes later. Phew! The mutzos didn’t like that at all- and neither did we……. Yep, Thursday 1300 hr. test of the tornado warning sirens! Sheesh!
Anyhow, the park charges $11, yes you read that right, $11 a night to camp here if you are a senior and that includes 50 amp electric service and water on site with a really nice sanitary dump station and run of the entire park. I think it’s less the than $15 for everyone younger. The only downside of the RV portion of the park is the parking pads are in need of some maintenance and we are in the flightpath of Dallas Intenational. Luckily the plane engines are throttled down as they are on final approach.
Back to why I am here in the Dallas area……….. First, I love to drive a 35 foot motorhome towing our Subaru through wilting traffic conditions. I love to drive I driving in adverse conditions and not understand all the highway signage that is foreign to everyone not native to Texas. I love driving the speed limit and have cars camped two inches off of my back bumper. And I love trying to merge 50 plus feet of rolling stock from one lane to another with not one driver willing to yield 50 feet of real estate. Yep, that’s why I am here.
Well, that is what goes on for the driver of this big rig but the real reason we are here is Jil wanted to check out a Robson and a Del Webb Senior Community. We only made it to the Del Webb community in nearby Frisco.
That community is really nice. Nice homes, nice amenities. 3000 homes will be built. It’s amenities include a public golf course, three large community centers, three outdoor swimming pools, one indoor swimming pool, large event rooms (450 folk capacity) , craft rooms, billiard rooms, tennis courts, pickleball courts, miles of walking paths- all at a reasonable price for the homes and monthly owner assessments.
It’s all very nice but this part of the world doesn’t excite me. I’m used to SoCal and Reno weather, not Dallas weather. It’s a little too far from family. I’m used to the light Reno traffic, not that of the megalopolis of 1.3 million people, all who drive on the interstates at the same time, called Dallas. We wanted to see Del Webb, Frisco Lakes and we did, so there.
Next we head west once again. A storm is brewing and it’s headed right for Dallas. See you next time!
Travel With Jil and Mike 