Destination: Glen Rose, TX - 9 hours covering 585 miles
So, what about Glen Rose, TX caused us to change our destinations, picking it over Austin, TX? In its inception, the plan across the country, included three hot night spots. Once adjectives started floating back into my mind after years of hearing mostly nouns in the DC area, the rhapsody of breaking from one's own pencil drawing and mapquests overtook me. That's on one exultant level. On another level, somewhere close to the skin surface for all of us, we'd had our fill of nightlife and restaurants and were dying to start visiting more off the beaten track places and use our kitchen to get back to knowing what was in our food. While causation never implies correlation, vacation trips that show three nights in a row of going out on the town also show a lower-than average attempt at getting to the great outdoors, so before the night sucked us into its stride, we steered where we could have veered and ended up looking up national parks in Texas. It turns out there are lots of gorgeous parks.
Being that I intended to check out the dinosaur park in Maryland in Laurel and never had the chance, a dinosaur park in Texas captured my imagination. Plus, it was en route toward Carlsbad Caverns, which was certainly staying on the list of places we would see on this trip barring any sudden moves by the weather. Glen Rose, TX is home to a dinosaur park and the fringe benefit of a great golf course. I love dinosaurs and Justin and Marilyn love golf. (I play golf every once in a while.) So, off for our new adventure. At this point my husband might be wondering how dare I use the word fringe in association with golf!
In Texas, Mel luxuriated with me while our RV made it down Interstate 49 meeting up with Interstate 20 heading into eastern Texas.
Dinosaur Valley State Park proved to be a great idea. First I dropped Justin and Marilyn off at the Squaw Valley golf club in town. There comes a time in a woman's life that she has to go chasing dinosaur prints! Off I went with the RV. It was a pretty cold morning. I stopped at the little tourist information service in downtown Glen Rose and had a wonderful conversation about the weather with a blonde visitor guide in her 60s with a true love of all things Glen Rose. We compared San Francisco, DC and Glen Rose in terms of life styles and dressing for the weather and we both admitted that cold San Francisco and cold Glen Rose to both of us were contradictions in terms determined at mutually exclusive events especially since I was at Texas at the moment. Where might I be able to buy myself a hat and gloves? Since we're moving across country, sure I own a hat and gloves, but to figure out posthaste what box they ended up in sometimes isn't worth the time you lose. It is a truism that we never get that time back and a palatable possibility that I might win the value of a new hat and gloves back ulteriorly. The guide didn't exactly faint at the idea of ever visiting DC given its tendency to be overcrowded and unabashedly filled often with detached communities, but she was absolutely delightful to talk to and loved living in community-oriented Glen Rose. She said the town was safe and with lots of things to do around the area, but she also shared her captivation of San Francisco years ago. After leaving her office and walking to the convention center parking lot where the RV wouldn't take up all the spaces, I picked up a hat and gloves and I turned that RV down the only road that leads to Dinosaur Valley State Park off the Paluxy River.
I jumped out of the RV as soon as I could park the beast, and paid my entry fee at the headquarters, asking questions about how to find the dinosaur tracks. Of course, visions of carrying a brush and a basic paleontologist tool kit ran through my mind reiteratively, despite my presumed assumption that there were going to be pretty well marked signs and an interpretive guide visibly displayed very soon. I based this assumption on the most likely scenario where visitors looking for dinosaur tracks likely experience manifestations of what they thought might just be dinosaur tracks in the river banks. This inevitably leads them to walk away convincing themselves that they saw some tracks simply to avoid walking away empty-handed.
Obliged to my expectation, I saw an interpretive guide posted at headquarters and then subsequently at the well marked track sites that described what the different prints might look like. The state park ranger behind the desk also provided me with a map where she highlighted Track Site #1 "The Blue Hole" and Track Site #2 "Main Track Site" as the places to go to see actual dinosaur tracks. She informed me that Track Site #3 was washed away during recent storms and the result was that the tracks ended up buried again.
I learned before I took off that the Paluxy River footprints became famous when R.T. Bird saw them in 1937 while collecting fossils for the American Museum of Natural History. While searching for teeming preserved carnivorous dinosaur tracks like a track that he had seen displayed taken from the Paluxy and displayed at a trading post in Gallup, New Mexico, he found plant-eating footprints instead. He probably at least had a brush to brush away all this river bed off rocks! In fact, he exceptionally found a trackway recording the footsteps of many animals both plant eaters and meat eaters that provided clues to their travel patterns of traveling in herds and the speed of their travel. RT Bird theorized that the trackway he unearthed provided evidence of an attack by the faster meat-eater theropod on a slower moving plant-eating sauropod, which is still being discussed and debated to this day since it has never been proven.
While I didn't find further evidence of any new footprints, I did find the common tracks in the areas that the park ranger sent me to observe in my search. During my adventurous frisking of the Paluxy River to find the footprints, I met a traveller from New Jersey, Richard, who is on a 5-year trek in his RV whose infatuation with choring crowds, industrial parks and Jersey Shore dissipated one day like an apparition wearing cleaning gloves and carrying folder tabs that suddenly realized it was giving an ethereal reduction to tears to Richard not from being a scary ghost but from being a drip. Richard helped me find one of the sets of prints, after which I helped him find another set of well-hidden tracks. I also met a wonderful couple who were just as amazed as I was at the tracks found at Site #2 in particular who later inquired into renting an RV. Here are my photos:
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| The types of tracks I might find |
Site #1:
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| The types of tracks I would find here and where I would find them |
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| My photo evidence of one of those tracks in the poster above |
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| gives you an idea of the shelf under the water where the footprints are submerged |
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| can't really see past the water |
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| just a beautiful picture of the area |
Site #2:
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| I took pictures of the interpretive signs so I could take them down to the Puluxy riverbed and find these footsteps |
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| 'You are Here' and then the pink dotted arrows point to where to find various dinosaur footprints |
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| Here's the first print I went searching for. I sort of saw it while looking for it with Richard from New Jersey, but we both admitted that it wasn't worth photographic evidence, because it didn't look that much like the photo in the poster above. Maybe there was too much debris. |
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| Here's the second set of prints I went searching for |
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| Here's the really cool set of dinosaur prints I went in search for |
And here is my very own photo evidence:
Site # 3 was not a viewable site for dinosaur prints, but I was glad that I had hiked there because I saw this:
I picked up Justin and Marilyn at the golf course. They really enjoyed themselves and the course was world class. We returned to the Cedar Ridge RV park and talked to a neighbor who came in from Wisconsin after helping his wife's mother move in with her siblings. He pulled a r-pod light travel trailer and he tried to sell us on it.
Mainly, I am interested in seeing the country and meeting people. You wonder at times when do we really get a chance to talk to people from all over the country at various junctures of their lives and perfectly comfortable talking to strangers. It's in these settings. What a pleasure!
I had a chance to talk to the RV park's owner earlier in the day. The campground is run by a guy named Bill who served in the Army and ends up having nuclear techs stay at his campground every 18 months who work on the nearby Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant to make sure that technically everything is still sound. No known accidents there to this day according to Bill. Texas really has some friendly folks. Bill talked about Jimmy Carter's graduate work in nuclear physics and how during Carter's graduate work in nuclear physics and how during Carter's service in the Navy, he was part of a team that helped dismantle the damaged nuclear reactor at the Chalk River plant in Ontario, Canada. Carter had himself inspected Three Mile Island at the height of the media scares. Bill seemed to respect that type of leadership around issues that evolve at nuclear facilities.
The Star-Telegram reported that in November, 2012, one of the two reactors at Comanche was closed manually after a cooling pump overheated but no safety issues emerged.
Later that evening walking around the campground, we witnessed an absolving sunset that evening that advised us that, yes, we are in big sky country reminding us as always that it's not just what we're up against that we should filter our thoughts through, but filter ourselves through our own individual appreciations. Ah, the act of putting intention into practices is leak proof for a dreamer's spittoon. Although traveling at this time of year involves a lot more risk when it comes to weather, I realized along the way that the benefits of traveling outweighed the problems associated with colder temperatures. We had our sweaters, we were all willing to brave a bit of a colder temperature on our hikes, and we had heat at night. At night, I've been cuddling up to read a book by author Sean McGrady entitled "The Backslider." Deep themes and riveting use of language to really develop a very strong narrative voice for the main character Marius.
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