Right before Easter we found ourselves intentionally parked on a Wal Mart lot in Fort Stockton, TX. This particular spot in Texas is somehow half-way between everywhere everyone is trying to get to. It’s a dusty, scrappy little Texas town on the edge of nowhere that has suddenly come back to life with the Bust/Boom oil economy that is so prevalent in Texas. Oil is being drilled anew nearly everywhere around here. In another time and place it would have been the featured setting for the great oil saga,“There will be Blood”. Being where it is, campers like ourselves take full advantage of the Wal Mart leniency by local management to let folks camp out on the parking lot. Typically, these campers will spend good money in that same store, so again, it is good trade. On this particular pre-Easter holy night, I counted over 23 big motor homes and trailers, all camped out under a full moon right there on the lot. It was a party atmosphere and a lot of the campers were out of their rigs trading information and stories of life on the road...it was a very ironic and memorable evening for us.
Leaving Fort Stockton, we made our way to the Texas hill country. This beautiful area sits squarely on top of porous limestone bedrock. This means that there are caves galore in the area and incidentally, being that I am from Missouri, the Cave State, I was really blown away by the beauty of the formations in one of the caves, Sonora Caverns. Also within this area you will find small German immigrant towns founded and built by migrating German families that still retain a lot of their original charm and sensibility. George Strait, the country music legend lives here and I can easily see why. It’s beautiful here.
One of the most beautiful features of the area is the free-flowing and milky green shaded Guadalupe River. This river resembles the Meramec river back in Ol’ Missouri so much. Boulder strewn river bed, challenging riffles to canoe or kayak through, lots of varieties of fish and wildlife, and the ever-present river character or two thrown in for good measure. One such character we met on the river was Gary. Gary took great pride in the fact that he was a “bridge jumper”, meaning he like to jump from various bridges into the river whenever the mood or beer struck him to do that. Gary told us a story of how he was rappelling down from one such bridge and his carabiner broke sending him crashing into the river some 60 feet below. “Broke both my feet on that there one”, he proudly proclaimed. Gary told us he likes to try to lower himself IN a kayak from the road bed of the bridge into the river by ropes. “That’s pretty cool, but why do you do that ?” Diane asked. “ You need to be able to do that in an emergency, so I want to be able to do it”, was Gary’s logical reply.
The one distinguishing characteristic about the Guadalupe that makes it different from so many Missouri rivers is the fact that instead of being lined with sycamore trees, it is lined with cypress trees, giving the river a sort of Gothic Louisiana look and feel.
Diane and I had a blast floating the Guadalupe and I’m certain we will do it again down the road. TWO of the rapids were pretty hair-raising, requiring me to jump out of the boat to keep it from crashing head first into a giant boulder. We took our sweet time and we caught 12-13 nice size edible bluegill (which I fried up that night!), a pretty darn big Buffalo that I would estimate at 8 pounds or better, several bass and a few fiddler catfish. Just a real dreamy, ideal, float trip kind of a day. As John Hartford sang, “ Row away row o’er the waters so blue as we float like a feather in our gum tree canoe.’