USA

Frio River, Texas: Garner State Park, Paddle Boats & a Tarantula

November 24, 2017 by Michael Huntley

Last Updated: May 2026

The Frio River — frio meaning cold in Spanish — is spring-fed from the karst limestone aquifers of the Edwards Plateau, and it earns the name. The water runs crystal clear and consistently cool regardless of season, and it carves through a landscape of live oaks, cedar, and limestone bluffs that is quintessentially Texas Hill Country. In summer the Frio is one of the most popular tubing and kayaking rivers in Texas; we arrived in late November to find the off-season in full effect — ropes swings hanging still, rental outfitters shuttered, roads nearly empty. It was exactly the right amount of quiet.

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Texas Hill Country: Wineries, LBJ Ranch, Fredericksburg & Luckenbach

November 19, 2017 by Michael Huntley

Last Updated: May 2026

Texas Hill Country sits west of Austin in the geologic region known as the Edwards Plateau — a rugged, ancient landscape shaped by Karst topography, where millennia of rainfall have dissolved the underlying limestone and dolomite into a terrain of sinkholes, caves, underground rivers, and cedar-covered hillsides. It is, in the most literal sense, Switzerland without the altitude. The area has a unique cultural fusion of Spanish colonial heritage and 19th-century German immigration, and it produces — somewhat surprisingly for a state not always associated with viticulture — some of the most interesting wines being made anywhere in the South. We came for the wine. We stayed for everything else.

This was an extended stay: two campgrounds, a dozen wineries and tasting rooms, a presidential national historical park, a World War II museum that made us rethink everything we thought we knew about the Pacific theater, the most famous dance hall in Texas, and a pair of hand-made boots. Texas Hill Country is not a weekend destination. It deserves a week, minimum.

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Waco, Texas: Army Corps Campground, Magnolia Silos & Mammoth National Monument

November 11, 2017 by Michael Huntley

Last Updated: May 2026

We pulled out of Grapevine heading south toward Texas Hill Country for wine tasting, and Waco made sense as a two-night stop along the way. It was a practical choice that turned into something considerably more interesting. Waco has been quietly accumulating things worth seeing — a lakeside Army Corps of Engineers campground that ranks among the best we’ve used, the Magnolia Silos complex that Chip and Joanna Gaines built into a destination, and a National Monument that preserves one of the most remarkable prehistoric discoveries in North America. We arrived knowing about one of those three. We left glad we’d stopped.

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Grapevine, Texas: St. Louis Gateway Arch, Will Rogers KOA & the Fort Worth Stockyards

November 4, 2017 by Michael Huntley

Last Updated: May 2026

November arrived and with it the annual migration south. After nearly a month in Nappanee, Indiana — three weeks of warranty work, train horns, 5am warehouse traffic, and one unexpectedly lovely stint at a lakeside resort — it was time to point the motorhome toward warmer latitudes. This year’s winter plan: Texas first, then Arizona. The route south took us through St. Louis, across the Oklahoma plains, and finally into the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where we settled in at Grapevine, Texas for an extended stay before continuing west.

The drive south through the fall Midwest was its own reward. The leaves had peaked while we were in Indiana, and the landscape was doing that late-October thing where everything is gold and amber and the light goes low and long by 4pm. After the intensity of the New England circuit and the industrial weeks in Nappanee, the open road felt like a deep breath. Canadian geese were moving south ahead of us on the same general schedule. We felt a kinship.

Longhorn Cattle Drive Fort Worth Stockyards

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Erie to Nappanee: Presque Isle, Port Clinton Halloween & Newmar Amish Country

October 29, 2017 by Michael Huntley

Last Updated: May 2026

After the thunder of Niagara Falls, we pointed west and began the long drive toward Indiana — and toward a date with the factory that built our motorhome. The route took us through Erie, Pennsylvania on the southern shore of Lake Erie, then across Ohio in time for an unexpected Halloween celebration in a packed RV park, and finally into the heart of Amish and Mennonite country in northern Indiana. Nappanee was our destination: the birthplace of our Newmar motorhome and the place where the warranty work we’d been scheduling since late summer would finally get done.

We had no particular expectations for any of these stops, which may be why they all surprised us. The peninsula at Presque Isle turned out to be one of the finest state parks on the Great Lakes. Port Clinton, Ohio handed us a fully costumed, 100-trick-or-treater Halloween party we hadn’t planned on. And Nappanee gave us Amish buggies, a round barn theatre, city art, and three weeks of 5am wake-up calls by train horn. You take the beautiful with the industrial.

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Upstate New York: Herkimer Diamonds, Finger Lakes Wineries & Niagara Falls

October 16, 2017 by Michael Huntley

Last Updated: May 2026

Leaving the warm embrace of family in Barton, Vermont, we pointed the Airstream south and west into the heart of upstate New York — a region we’d largely bypassed on previous road trips but had always meant to explore. What followed was one of the most packed and rewarding weeks of our entire 2017 New England circuit: digging for Herkimer diamonds along a rushing river, navigating the rolling vineyards of the Finger Lakes wine country, hiking through a gorge with nineteen waterfalls, and finally standing at the edge of one of the greatest natural wonders on earth.

Upstate New York surprised us at every turn. The landscape shifts dramatically as you move west — from the foothills of the Adirondacks to the long, glacier-carved lakes of the Finger Lakes region, and then north to the thundering spray of Niagara Falls on the Canadian border. If you’ve written off New York State as just a place you drive through to get somewhere else, this route will change your mind.

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