First day on the road. It feels great to be travelling again. We departed McKinney this morning about 8:30, topped off on diesel, and headed out. In keeping with our desire to keep daily travel down to small legs, we headed for Quanah TX, about ½ way to Amarillo. Research said there should be some decent restaurants and a backup state park in case the RV park wasn’t great. We ate lunch in Wichita Falls at the Love’s Subway. Even at Love’s, parking was a challenge but lunch was fine. We arrived Quanah about 2:30pm. The Ole Cotton Gin RV Park is nice enough with 50A electric so we can run both A/C’s. We have reservations in Pagosa Springs CO starting the 20th and departing the 30th. Our plan was to stay overnight in Amarillo, and stay a few days in Santa Fe, NM before arriving in Pagosa. After setting up the coach I spent the next 3 hours trying unsuccessfully to get reservations in Santa Fe and instead secured 2 days in Amarillo, 3 nights in Chama NM. It turns out Santa Fe has a Indian Market Festival going on and end of summer tourists and there was nothing within 100 miles available for the weekend we needed. Even Chama was nearly sold out. Donna pointed out that if Santa Fe was booked solid, we had better secure a place over Labor Day weekend now. After a little digging I booked the 30th through September 3rd in Durango CO. Durango wasn’t easy either. Finally we have a place to stay from now through the Labor Day holiday weekend.
After I finally wrapped up reservations it was dinner time. We checked out all of the Trip Advisor restaurants and everything we thought was available appeared to either be open only on the weekend or shut down entirely. As a matter of fact, the entire town seems to have fallen on hard times. It seemed like nearly all of the local businesses had gone out of business. Quanah has a neat old downtown square that appeared mostly unoccupied. We ended up eating dinner at Sonic. After dinner we headed to check out Copper Breaks Texas State Park. This park was our backup spot for the night and would have been pretty nice. The park had lots of open, spacious RV spots with electric and water. While there we explored a 0.7 mile loop trail that was nice but hot with lots of fairly steep vertical climbing and descending. The trail was fairly scenic with interesting rock formations. We were glad to make it back to the air conditioned car. We finally made it back to the coach about 0830pm.
A word about Quanah. Like many towns in this part of Texas and nearby Oklahoma, Quanah is named after Commanche Indians. In this case, Quanah-Parker. Quanah-Parker was the Commanche Chief during the transition from free roaming Commanches to being consigned to a reservation. I highly recommend the book Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History. It is a fascinating, but gory, history of the Commanches.
Overall a nice start to our new adventure. Tomorrow, we head to Amarillo and the Fort Amarillo RV Ranch for a few nights.