RV Park Review: Hwy 71 RV Park, Cedar Creek, TX

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We stayed at this Austin-area park from December 2019 until June 2020. We planned to leave at the end of April, but decided to wait to travel due to COVID-19. This was our first time visiting Austin, and we loved it. We found a couple great safe places to eat (see our reviews of Zucchini Kill and Always Hungry), the best co-op grocery store ever (the unfortunately named Wheatsville), the Dinosaur Park. Sadly, we never got to check out the Congress Avenue Bridge bats due to the pandemic and avoiding crowds, but there’s always next time. Hwy 71 RV Park is located on the east side of Austin in the town of Cedar Creek. The nearest town with grocery stores and services (including a Buc-ee’s!) is Bastrop. There’s also Bastrop Mobile Home and RV Parts, which just opened this year and David used frequently for working on clients’ RVs in …

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The Dinosaur Park, Bastrop, Texas

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While this is geared towards kids, we are complete and total suckers for anything dinosaur, and it was right next door to us at Hwy 71 RV Park (we could see a couple dinos from inside the RV park!), so we absolutely had to check this place out. The Dino Park is only open from Thursday to Sunday during the day, and it was $9 per adult to get in. You enter through the gift shop, which was full of dino-themed goodness, and an animatronic dino show which you could watch by dropping a few quarters into the machine. Once you pay for your tickets, you can go out the back door and wander through the park. It’s an easy to follow path that’s stroller-friendly, although I did have a little trouble from time to time with my wheelchair, despite my Freewheel attachment. Overall I’d call this an easy walk, …

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Where has the time gone?

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It’s been a busy 3 months since our last post. All things considered (hashtag 2020), we are doing well and hanging in there. We have many updates to make! Since we left Austin, Texas in June, we’ve been to New Mexico and Northern California. We’re still in NorCal right now, in the middle of fire season and a pandemic. Jen survived the extended tax season (and is now going into extension season), and since RVing is one of the safest ways to travel and vacation right now because of the pandemic, David has been extremely busy repairing RVs. For the last 2 months, we were at our very first work camping gig (stay tuned for a blog post about that), where we had lousy cell service and no internet access. Now that we’re back in civilization with cell service, we plan on doing a lot of updating and catching up. …

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Happy Pride Month! And a PSA.

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Here’s a rainbow we saw on our travels this week, directly overhead! Despite more people than ever staying home, police violence against Black people continues just as it has since the country was founded. People have reached a tipping point and are collectively standing up for justice because black lives matter. Remember the campsite rule: leave your site better than you found it. What can you do to leave this world better than you found it? The RV community (especially the RV community online) has a whiteness problem, and we need to change that. Find outdoorsy accounts/blogs/channels run by Black folks and follow them. Challenge 10-year age limits at RV parks (which disproportionately affects lower income RVers, and lower income people are more likely to be people of color). Reconsider your RV park reviews complaining about “long term residents” which is often code for “poor people” (who are more likely …

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When RV Life Meets Quarantine Life

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Like most of you, we’ve been isolating ourselves from most of the world in order to help “flatten the curve” and avoid getting or giving COVID-19 (the novel coronavirus). To be honest, we’ve kind of lost track of time and how long this has been going on. I was buried deep in the blur that is tax season when the pandemic hit the U.S., and while I work remotely, most of my coworkers work out of physical offices in Massachusetts. Since we’re already set up for remote work, most everyone was able to limit or eliminate their in-office hours, and clients were able to work with us digitally. We thought we’d be pushing hard to make the April 15 deadline, but once the deadline became July 15, things have become a whirlwind. David has been working hard as a mobile RV technician, and had been so busy that he had …

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The Unfortunately Racist Origins of One of RVers’ Favorite Words

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Content warning: this post contains racial slurs in the context of educating the audience about these slurs. For those already aware of what I’m going to talk about, this could be jarring and upsetting. For those unaware, I hope it will become jarring and upsetting by the end of this post, in order to encourage everyone to remove this word from their vocabularies. For International Romani Day (April 8), I want to challenge my fellow RVers to remove the following word from your lives: Gypsy. We’ve all seen it: Romanticizing what RVers refer to as “gypsy” culture and lifestyle. The idea of traveling wherever the wind blows, an irresistible wanderlust, your home is wherever you park it, the freedom to live life on your own terms. But here’s the hard truth: the original “gypsies” are the Romani people, and that word is a racial slur loaded with prejudices and bigoted …

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Kitty enrichment: snuffle mats!

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We learned about these snuffle mats from our newest friends and fellow animal-loving RVers, Traci and Terry. We are always looking for kitty enrichment toys to avoid boredom and to keep the younger boys from harassing the older ladies. These are primarily designed for dogs, but who says cats can’t snuffle, too? Everyone loves it! Even Miss Kitty got into it, and she expects her food to be served by full service wait staff on fancy China. We used to use foraging toys (old pill bottles with a hole cut out) in our sticks-and-bricks homes, but they’re a trip and fall hazard in a tiny space, so they didn’t come with us into the RV. As a bonus, snuffle mats are easy to wash (just throw it in the laundry). We chose got this snuffle mat for dogs, which has an adjustable string to make the mat more compact for …

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Moving Day Checklists for RVers

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We love our moving day checklists. There are so many different parts of moving day when you’re moving an RV, that it’s too easy to forget something minor that becomes a major hassle later. We double- and triple-check anything safety related (like hitching the trailer to the truck) with or without a list, but rushing to pack up the RV could mean getting to your destination with a gallon (or more) of water on the floor, the contents of your cupboards all over your floor, or just stinky because you forgot to take the trash out before you closed everything up up and traveled 300 miles on a 90-degree day. We use iPhone’s built-in Notes app, and have 3 shared checklists, so when one of us checks off a task, it updates the other’s list. There are other apps out there that work in similar ways, and this isn’t ideal …

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Always Hungry: Gluten-Free Food Truck in Austin, Texas!

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One of our favorite charming qualities of Austin is that there’s a food truck on nearly every street corner, and there are so many interesting restaurants in the region. We’ve been here since December, and to date we haven’t found a lot of dedicated gluten-free spaces, making Always Hungry a delicious date-night treat. Always Hungry is a little taco truck (technically a trailer) in the parking lot of the Spider House Cafe and Ballroom, run by two best friends with a knack for delicious corn-free Mexican-inspired food. The menu is short, and everything starts out vegan, with the option to add meat for the omnivores. We shared two little tacos to start: one with mushrooms, and one with jackfruit. Both are delicious and come with greens, guac, lemon cashew aioli, hemp hearts, pickled onions (which I generously gave to David), and cilantro (no thanks), on homemade almond flour tortillas. They …

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Zucchini Kill Bakery: Gluten-Free Vegan Treats in Austin, Texas!

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We haven’t been talking too much about our travels… it’s about time we started doing that, right? Well, we’re near Austin, Texas until the end of April, and I think we’ve found our favorite bakery of all time: Zucchini Kill, a vegan womyn-owned bakery in Possum Park, a vegan paradise in Austin. There are several vegan food trucks in Possum Park, but only Zucchini Kill is a dedicated gluten-free business. They’re also soy-free, mostly corn-free (except occasional corn starch and xanthan gum, which is technically a corn product), and none of the most common allergens. They do use GF oats in a very small number of their treats, and the workers have all be fantastic about letting me read the ingredients before we buy anything. In addition to adorable and delicious donuts, cupcakes, Rebel Swrrrls, and Cream Coffins, they sell CBD-infused sodas and sweets, incense, Zucchini Kill swag (I’m totally …

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