Day: August 9, 2015

Texas State Parks Passes

There are 102 state parks in Texas, stretching from Resaca de la Palma near Brownsville in the south to Palo Duro Canyon south of Amarillo in the north; from Franklin Mountains in El Paso in the west to Sea Rim State Park in Sabine Pass to the east. Wherever in Texas you are, you are likely to be near (for Texas-native values of “near”) a state park. State Parks come in all sizes, as well, from the largest, the 311,000-acre (126,000 hectare) Big Bend Ranch State Park in Marfa to the smallest, the 16.1-acre (6.5 hectares) Old Tunnel State Park in Fredericksburg.

With a Texas State Parks Pass, which in 2015 costs $70, you and your guests can have unlimited visits to the parks of the Texas State Park System. “Guests” generally works out to anyone in the same noncommercial vehicle with the pass holder.  Holders of Texas State Parks Passes also get discounts on purchases in the stores of the parks and also on overnight camping, which can be done in a tent or in a recreational vehicle/RV.

This is not an ad, it’s more of a testimonial. On and off (mostly on) for the last ten years or so, I have been the proud holder of a Texas State Parks Pass. And we take pretty good advantage of our pass. Generally, my “guest” is actually a household member, my son (who has decided that he would like me to call him Alex in blog posts).  Occasionally, Alex and I will bring a friend (or two) with us to a park.

Being that Alex does not have a driver’s license yet, we haven’t wandered too far afield too often.  I am a native Chicagoan.  Where I grew up, anything farther than about 20 minutes away by car is far.  I have adjusted somewhat to the Texans’ idea of “close,” which is something along the lines of three or four hours (before we moved down here, Texans would tell us that San Antonio is close to Mexico, to Houston, and to the Gulf; the closest of these is two and a half hours away0. However, an hour, maybe as much as three for something really important, is about my maximum.  We have made it as far as the San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site to the east, Mustang Island State Park to the southeast, Garner State Park to the west, and McKinney Falls State Park to the north.  Mostly, though, we stay pretty close to the city.  We visit Government Canyon State Park once or twice a year, and Guadalupe River State Park a little less frequently than that.  We also go to Lost Maples State Natural Area every few years. In another year or so, once Alex has a driver’s license, we will be able to go farther, since we will have two drivers.

I don’t know if we exactly get $70 of activity out of the pass, but we do pretty well.  It is nice to be able to go to a state park on a whim. It is also a nice feeling to know that I am helping support the conservation and preservation work that the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department does.

My Travel Memories: St. Augustine, Florida

St. Augustine, Florida is definitely a place that I visited both before and after 1977.  I went there with my parents in the 1970s (and maybe visited it with my mom, aunt, and uncle in the late 1960s if memory serves) and in 1989 and then, for good measure, I made a return visit with my now-ex-husband in 1992.

In the United States, most people makes a big deal out of the Mayflower, like it is the very beginning of United States history.  I’ve even read a (pretty bad) young adult book in which the protagonist’s love interest is supposedly a descendant of Mayflower immigrants, as if that made him royalty or something along those lines.  As a result, it made a real impression on me when I was told that St. Augustine was the “oldest city” in the United States.  That is, of course, an oversimplification, since St. Augustine is technically the oldest continuously occupied European-established settlement in the United States.  The Native Americans had cities long before the Europeans got here.

St. Augustine got its name because the coast of Florida was first sighted by the settlers of the area on August 28, 1565.  August 28 is the feast day of St. Augustine. If they’d been running a day earlier, the city would be named “Santa Monica,” and if they’d been a day later, I don’t know what they would have named it, since August 29 is the Feast Day of the Martyrdom of St. John the Baptist.  Maybe they just would have gone with “San Juan de Bautista,” or “San Juan” for short.  Spanish settlers did this a lot.  I live in a city that was named for the day that the missionaries met the local Coahuiltecan tribe, the Payaya,

There are, as one would expect, a lot of historical buildings in St. Augustine, though no wooden buildings older than 1702, because the British burned the city in that year.  There is the “Oldest Wooden Schoolhouse,” which is not actually the oldest at all, since the actual oldest schoolhouse in existence in the United States, to our ability to determine, is on Staten Island and is roughly 20 years older than the St. Augustine schoolhouse.

It was always kind of a thrill to walk down the streets of St. Augustine and think about how this is as old as it gets (in terms of permanent European settlements at least) in the United States.  Probably the most interesting building to visit, as far as I am concerned, is the Castillo de San Marcos, which presumably was founded on or around April 25, the Feast Day of St. Mark the Evangelist. The Castillo de San Marcos is older than 1702, since it was built of coquina, a sedimentary rock formed of shells bonded together, and thus it survived the 1702 fire.

Some of the most memorable buildings of St. Augustine are comparatively modern.  In the late 1800s a tycoon by the name of Henry Flagler moved to St. Augustine.  He commissioned a number of elaborate buildings which are there to this day.  Among the buildings he commissioned are the Ponce de Leon Hotel (which is now home to Flagler College), the Alcazar Hotel (now the Lightner Building, containing a museum and the St. Augustine City Hall), and the Memorial Presbyterian Church (which is still a church).

Author’s Note:  I wrote this  and queued it up for June 26, then remembered bits and pieces of another place I’ve been, farther north in Florida than St. Augustine:  Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park in White Springs, Florida.  I don’t really remember much about it, though.  I remember a building with a colonnaded porch (the museum, apparently), trees covered with Spanish moss, and my mom explaining that the correct name of the river is “Suwannee” and not “Swanee.”   That last is how I came to be pretty sure that the park I remember is the one in Florida and not the Stephen C. Foster State Park in Georgia.  The river looks closer to the Florida park than it does to the Georgia one.  I also cannot see any buildings with columns in any photographs of the Georgia park.

(originally posted June 26, 2015)