Traveling With A Porpoise

Our stay in Georgetown has been great! We are only staying here a few days. We arrived Friday and will be departing tomorrow March 12th.

We arrived at the Jim Hogg State Park around 6-7 pm. The sun had already started to set and with it being Friday, there were at least four or five other campers coming in to the park behind us trying to beat the 10 pm gate curfew.

We pull in to the park and happily made our way toward the campgrounds. As we approached the camping area, I noticed there was a second gate barring our entry. Thinking that this must be an employee only area or some sort of special entry point, I passed by trying to find another entrance. We were greeted by a very steep boat launching dock into the lake.

Obviously, we were in the wrong place. I quickly checked my email to see if I had received some sort of code to get in the “members only club.” Lo and behold, there was indeed a sneaky 5 digit code pasted inconspicuously to the bottom of my reservation confirmation. Anette and I laughed briefly at my overlooking of our entry code. I typed in the code and we made our way toward our designated campsite.

Anette has an unfortunate tendency to hold onto anxiety and anxious thoughts. She’s working on it, but it’s still very much a work-in-progress. I, on the other complete hand, think very little about what others think of me. “Like water off a damned duck’s back. I don’t understand how he does it.” my father has proclaimed toward my deficiencies of anxiety and seemingly infinite patience. I believe that is what makes Anette and I work so well together, we balance and complement each other’s personalities well.

As we are pulling up to our campsite, we notice that the “street” is incredibly narrow. If we were to stop for any length of time, we would be blocking the entire path. We are tired from driving 6 hours and Anette’s nerves are screaming at her to just leave the park and go find somewhere else for the night. All we want to do is park, eat, and sleep.

We still needed to offload the car and motorcycle before we could even think about parking – let alone sleeping. We stopped at our campsite briefly in the hopes we could disconnect everything quickly. Soon after I park and start to walk out the door, I’m greeted by not only one pair of headlights but 3 other pairs of headlights. Since it was 7pm on a Friday night there were at least a dozen people set to be arriving to the park that evening. We were blocking the road. Anette is in panic mode because we’re blocking traffic, so I jump back in the pilot seat and take off. We had passed a large parking lot on the path toward our campsite and made our way back. It wouldn’t be ideal, but we could pull in the overflow parking area – offload, park Dolly, then bring the vehicles back to the campsite.

We decided against pulling into the parking lot entirely because the road leading into the parking lot was kinda busy. So we pulled off onto the “shoulder” aka the grass, and started to disengage the car and motorcycle from the towing gear.

We have gotten the system down pretty well. First, all the lights are unplugged, the motorcycle straps are released, and quickly move to removing the motorcycle from the hitch. Second, the car straps are released and removed (they straddle the front wheels) and the car is driven off the dolly with some strategically placed ramps. Third, the motorcycle hitch has to be removed from the hitch receiver (otherwise the car dolly can’t be removed properly.) Lastly, the ball socket from the dolly is released and moved to its resting place and locked. Our first attempt, probably 2.5 hours from start to finish. Now, we can do it in about 1 to 1.5 hours. In the future, I’m hoping we can get it down even faster to 25-30 minutes. But I may be too optimistic, I’ll settle for anything less than an hour.

We disengaged everything successfully and made our way back to our campsite, unburdened. Not to toot my own horn, but I’ve gotten pretty damn good at driving Dolly. Forward and reverse. I backed in with ease and get her lined up perfectly to set up the water/electric hookups.

I need a few more data points (gas tank fills) to get an accurate estimate of our fuel consumption. We had read online that you can expect anywhere between 5 and 9 MPG when in a Class A motorhome towing a vehicle (colloquially called a toad). Our gas gauge is busted so we just estimated 5 to be on the safe side and track our mileage via the odometer. I was expecting to put in ~$150 of gas while we were in Paris to fill up, it only took $65 before it shut off automatically. This was great news! It meant that we were getting much better gas mileage than we were expecting.

While the stay here has been short (5 days vs our normal stay of 14 days) it has been wonderful. All the campers are very nice, quiet, clean (minus one campsite that looks like a department store barfed on it), and the scenery is beautiful.

Saturday, Anette and I drove down to Austin to visit her friend, Joanna, and her boyfriend, Tyler. I had met “Jo” once before and she’s very nice, fun, and funny. But this was my first time meeting Tyler. I really enjoyed talking with him and seeing their home with their small dog, Rocky, aka Pickle Rick aka Pickle aka Rock – the list could go on forever most likely. Tyler had to work, but would meet with us later in the day. Anette, Jo, and I went to the Affordable Art Show. It was a blast! Free cocktails, Delta-9 THC seltzers, and a fun little scavenger hunt to meet all the different artists. Ten artists in all! At the end there was a raffle to win some art from the artists, Jo ended up getting one that she had wished for before we started the tour.

Afterward, we met Tyler at Super Thai Cuisine off of South Lamar. The food was phenomenal! I got the Red Curry (a favorite of mine) and Anette got the Chicken Larb. Both amazingly delicious. We wanted to hang out with the couple more, but we were racing the clock to get back before the 10 pm curfew and unfortunately had to cut the double date short. That didn’t stop us from chowing down on some stellar homemade cheesecake Jo had made a few nights ago. We bid them (and Rocky) a nice night and made our way to Georgetown.

The rest of the stay has been tame compared to the first two action packed nights; movie nights, cleaning, and meal planning/prepping for the next week. This week was some tasty turkey breakfast burritos, with a chicken shawarma rice bowl for dinner.

Make sure to check our Instagram and TikTok for pictures and clips of our adventures here in Georgetown! Links are off to the right, or you can find us at @anettedawnn on TikTok and dollypark.in on Instagram.

Be well and safe travels ✌️