We Messed with Texas

As COVID-19 continued closing in, we spent about a week in Texas. Our original plans had included both Austin and San Antonio, and we did visit both. The visit experience, however, was not what we had originally planned.

On our way into Texas from Louisiana, we had a very nice lunch with the mother of our son Sawyer's girlfriend. We'd not met in person before, and it was nice to spend time with her.

Our original Austin reservation had overlapped with the South by Southwest festival, and we'd thought it would be fun to attend some music performances. However, about two weeks before our arrival they announced they were postponing the festival (among the first of the now hundreds of cancellations).

By the time we arrived in Austin, most gardens, museums, and other places we'd planned on seeing (e.g., the LBJ Presidential Library) had closed. Our campground was about 20 minutes outside the downtown area.

We did go into Austin one day and spent time walking along the shores of the Colorado River, which flows through the downtown area. There were a number of people out walking, running, or biking, but not so many that we couldn't keep our social distance. Most were young - we saw few people our age.

Austin is close to Texas hill country, so we had a couple of long drives through that area. One bonus: the bluebonnets (the Texas state flower) were blooming in force. Although our previous impression of Texas was that it would be desert-like, this middle section of the state was quite green, at least in Spring.

We moved on to San Antonio, which is about 90 minutes southwest of Austin, for a couple of days. We stayed in a campground about 10 minutes from downtown.

San Antonio has a beautiful area downtown called the River Walk, full of shops and restaurants along the river, which sits about 20-30 feet below the level of the rest of the city. Most of the establishments were closed (a few restaurants were offering takeout), but we had a nice long stroll along the River Walk, which was largely deserted.

The Alamo is in that same area of the city. We were able to see the outside, although the Park Service had closed it due to COVID-19.

The pandemic news was getting worse, and although Texas was not on a state-wide lock down, more places were voluntarily shutting down every day (with the notable exception of gun shops). Although the state was not taking any type of coordinated response, one bright spot was the H.E.B. grocery chain that was strictly enforcing social distancing, and also placing and enforcing purchasing limits on critical products so that we were able to get supplies we needed. We later learned that this grocery chain's Emergency Response Center had began to plan for the pandemic in early January! It geared up their warehouses and their supply chain to be ready when the grocery shopping surge began. Since the Ciaowagen has limited storage space, a small refrigerator, and even smaller freezer we have to be strategic in our food purchasing. Having access to a stocked grocery made that a bit easier.

We were concerned about how well the state and local Texas governments were responding to the coronavirus, and decided to hightail west to Tucson, Arizona. Our plan was to hunker down for a month and watch-and-wait pandemic developments, while still being close to good medical facilities in case we got sick. We drove 900 miles in two days (that's a lot of driving in an RV), passing by El Paso, through New Mexico, and finally to Desert Trails RV Park 20 minutes west of Tucson. It's the campground where we'd spent two weeks last May during our car-replacement debacle (follow this link and this link to see more).

Desert Trails was fairly empty the first time we visited in May 2019 - the campground caters to snowbirds who winter in Arizona. When we arrived at end of March 2020, most of the campsites were still occupied (although you can see that trailer to the left of the photo was already wrapped up for the season). Some folks had decided to extend their stay due to the coronavirus. We'll see how things clear out over the next month. We'll also get to see the blooming of the cactus flowers while we're here.

The campground has instituted very tight social distancing guidelines and cleanliness standards. It has arranged for local food trucks (Italian, Spanish, Chinese, BBQ, etc.) to visit daily on a rotating basis. That keeps some money circulating in the food truck industry and keeps people from making more trips to the grocery store. The campground is adjacent to Suguaro National Park and in just a few steps we can safely be exploring the desert trails in a remote portion of the park.

We will drop a blog post again in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, we hope everyone stays safe, washes their hands frequently, socially distances, and gets some exercise!