DIY and Travel Adventures in an Airstream Interstate
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
LAKE HOUSTON PARK DAY TRIP
Having recently repaired a few issues with our 2007 Airstream Interstate which we purchased in September 2014, we were anxious to finally hit the road this past weekend and do at least one overnight so we could further test all the vehicle's systems.
Correct. If you buy an Airstream Interstate, it could be argued that you end up with one that was created for you, as our repair sequence of posts suggests.
Alas, we were too late to get reservations anywhere local (I forgot that Tuesday is Veterans Day, a holiday for many workers who would extend their time into a long weekend for travel purposes). Not wanting to resort to Wallydocking (it just did not seem auspicious for our first overnight!), we decided we would take our AI on a simple day trip instead, a trip to this park.
It was renamed Lake Houston Wilderness Park shortly after Texas Parks and Wildlife Department divested it from their system in 2006, turning its administration over to the City of Houston and Montgomery County.
Map image courtesy of Google.
Eerily, you can still find a lot of original references to Lake Houston State Park (LHSP) on the internet, including the original official map.
Lake Houston Park was, and still is, the best-kept outdoor secret in greater Houston, as this Chron article attests. Years ago, back when it was still LHSP, I knew every inch of it, backcountry camped in every inch of it (in fact, my husband proposed to me there). The state of Texas never devoted sufficient funds to developing it, and 99% of those reported 22,000 annual visitors never really left the day-use area (imagine a 5,000-acre park with only 22,000 visitors inside a city of 6.5 million people - it boggles the mind). Even though Houston is now in the process of upgrading park facilities, it still hasn't reached a tipping point of public awareness. I have mixed feelings about that.
Here is our travelogue for this simple yet unprecedented day hike.
You'll notice on the Google grab above a road called "Five Mile Road". That's because it really is five miles from one end of the park to the other. There's nothing else like this tract of land in Houston.
We decided that we would take a deep breath and hike all the way south to Lake Isabell, a small cypress lake near the San Jacinto River. It's almost a ten-mile round trip from the park office, and I rarely walk it (mostly bike it) because it takes at least an hour and fifteen minutes of brisk walking each way. But it was a beautiful day with perfect weather and we decided to go for it.
Five Mile Road is not well-traveled. We did our trip on one of the most beautiful Sunday afternoons of the year, and saw only one other person for the entire ten miles of the road.
One emerges from the long tunnel of trees only to be greeted by this astonishing sight. The lake appears to be man-made (it is surrounded by pushed-up levees) but it has had many decades to naturalize.
There is a small, old dock jutting out into the lake. It used to be T-shaped but we saw that the T-cross had floated to the opposite side of the lake.
In another week or two or three, the cypress will complete their fall color change, and this entire scene will become a riotous orange.
We fired up our Jetboiland had a fine meal of freeze-dried grub, which has come a long way, quality-wise, in the past few years.
One of my favorite things to do is to trek slowly around the perimeter of Isabell, because the light and color palette changes dramatically depending on which direction you are facing. This effect tends to persist regardless of the time of year or stage of foliage. Here on the far south side looking north-ish, cool tones will predominate.
On the north side looking south, one catches more of the western sun and the golden tones emerge.
Not sure that I've even seen this thorny species before.
Water bugs exploiting surface tension.
After we had our lunch and our slow jaunt around the lake, we settled back onto the dock for a nap to recharge our batteries prior to the trek back north. We were at the lake for several hours and not another person came by. My husband and I had camped near this end of the park years ago while it was undergoing the state-to-city ownership transition, and we lamented that our days of routinely having Lake Isabell all to ourselves would surely soon come to a close. If this past Sunday is any indication, that day has not yet arrived, and here we are seven or eight years later.
View from the nap: My guess would be wood ducks, but I did not have my long lens with me.
On the five-mile hike back to our little RV, I must admit I was dragging. I am physically fit, but no longer accustomed to 10-mile hikes. So I would stop periodically to rest and smell the flowers.
Houston: It sucks during the summer, but this is what it looks like in November. I believe it was snowing in Minneapolis as I was taking these photos. Seriously.
Deer season began at the start of this month, and what sometimes happens is that deer flee into the park, taking refuge in a place where hunting has historically been limited to only a few days per year. They were everywhere.
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