California RV Destinations
Texas RV Destinations and Travels – RVing across the Lone Star State!
As you might imagine, Texas has a huge population of RV and mobile home enthusiasts who cruise its highways and byways every month of the year, enabled by the state’s very mild winters that make traveling via mobile home and RVs very easy.
Texas also features many RV parks and campgrounds that help families, couples and individuals to rest in comfort as they explore the Lone Star state.
Temperatures in the winter month of January, for example, range from 18° F at night in Amarillo to 45° F in Austin, so while snow can and does occur there, it happens largely in the panhandle area of Texas. Thunderstorms and lightning strikes, on the other hand, are prominent in Texas and can make for a harrowing driving experience for motorists. Texas is also home to Tornado Alley in its northern region, with Texas reporting more tornadoes than any other state in the Union. These manifest in the northern region and in the panhandle, and most often occur from April through June of the year. Texas also emits the most greenhouse gases of any state! Weather all across Texas can be monitored here.
Due to the vast size of Texas and its history with nearby Mexico and colonization, Native American tribes, and the oil and gas industry that has given the state extreme wealth, there are a tremendous number of destinations and locales to visit in your RV at any time of the year throughout the state. Below are several points of interest as covered by various RV lifestyle bloggers who have traveled throughout Texas and explored its many tranquil, beautiful, and curious destinations. Custom Glass Solutions is grateful for their reporting, so please take some time to check-out their well-researched blogs via their links.
The Houston Aquarium and Discovery Green
The most populated city in Texas really knows how to entertain families and children of all ages and their downtown aquarium, replete with touching pools, aquatic ecosystem displays and even shark tanks, is no exception. This is one amazing place and everyone who visits there has an enjoyable and usually educational time of it. The Kellogg Show RV blog has a great entry about their extra-large family’s adventure at the Texas Aquarium – featuring a rain forest, a live white tiger, touchable and adorable stingrays swimming in a pool. The adventurous Kelloggs also cover their encounter with the George H. Bush monument and the limestone concave sculptures known as The Listening Vessels – basically, sound art pieces the whole family can enjoy aurally. If your RV path takes you to Houston on your next trip, don’t miss these stellar stop-overs!
Big Bend National Park & Big Bend Ranch State Park
Massive and gorgeous in natural splendor, Big Bend National Park on the west side of Texas really should not be missed. A huge, sprawling national treasure that encompasses over 800,000 acres of land, this reserve features canyons, fossils, the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo rivers, and more than 1,200 species of plants and 450 species of birds. Big Bend National Park was the topic of several posts on the Love Your RV! Blog, where the writers were enchanted by its silence, ghost towns, artist refuges, and scenery both natural and man-made from a simpler time in our country’s history.
Not to be confused with Big Bend but rather considered its’ smaller, state-supported cousin, Big Bend Ranch State Park is the largest state park in Texas and boasts 311,000 acres of campable land on the Rio Grande River in two Texan counties. The flowers and mountain scenery at this locale are spectacular and the Boondocking scenery from the park as
Austin, Texas Is for Rock Climbing … and Bats!
Austin, Texas is the Lone Star state’s capital city, home to the University of Texas, and also the host of the always-growing-in-popularity music and culture festival South by Southwest – a cherished showcase of new music that has been taking on more of a technologic bend the past few years – as well as attracting hordes of visitors. Austin has a vibrant cultural scene filled with restaurants, bars, music rooms and venues of all sizes, as well as an ever-growing residential population. RVers find the small city to be an easy place to reside within temporarily, and there are ample RV parks and campgrounds for mobile homes of all shapes and sizes.
The RV bloggers known as Technomadia also found that Austin could be a fun spot for rock climbing, and posted a video blog post entry about their experience climbing upwards against rock faces outside of town. Perhaps more exciting, or creepy depending on how you look at it, is the amazing natural event that happens every night in Austin from March to November underneath the Congress Avenue Bridge – when literally a million-plus Mexican Free-Tailed Bats wake up and leave their roosts and fly and swarm through the warm night air. Austin is apparently the only city in the world where this happens, and is the site of the largest urban bat colony on the planet! The brave bat lovers of the Roadtreking RV blog cover it in their post right here.
Ghost Towns of Texas
After talking about masses of swarming bats, what could be better than … ghosts? The history of Texas contains a history of mining for gold and cinnabar, amongst other minerals and precious materials. (Oil, anyone?) When those deposits ran out, the towns that had sprung-up to support the miners also dried up, leaving architectural and sociologic “footprints in the sand” in the form of emptied ghost towns. These towns are fascinating glimpses into the Yesterday of Texas and how miners and even their families lived. The Roadtreking RV blog has a fine blog entry about ghost towns such as Lajitas and Terlingua, as well as upon the former mayor of Lajitas – Clay Henry, who was elected as mayor in 1886 and eventually was killed by his own son in a battle for “political succession.” Mr. Clay also happened to be a billy goat! You can read the fascinating blog post on these Texas Ghost towns right here. Or check out an entire website on Texas ghost towns if you’re curious.
We hope you’ve found these destinations and RV travel stops in Texas to be as fascinating to read as they were for us to write. Please make the effort to visit these fine locales on your next exploratory Texas adventure – you won’t regret it.
While you are driving your RV or mobile home across the vast and beautiful, desert-sparse Texan geography, if you experience trouble with your RV windshield, we’re here for you! Simply contact us to repair or replace your motorhome windshield anywhere in the state. Custom Glass Solutions offers speedy and professional windshield repair and replacement service in cities and towns from Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Corpus Christi and Fort Worth to El Paso, Galveston, Beaumont, Waco, Plano, Lubbock and all points in-between. Thanks for visiting!
Written by Matt Eder
