Visiting remote parks in this remote part of Texas

After attending church in Mineral Wells, Texas, we once again headed south in the motor home. It was windy for the two-hour drive to Lometa Regional Park just outside the tiny town of Lometa, Texas. We were in a remote part of Texas, where tourists usually just keep on driving. The sign out front of our campground listed weekly and monthly rates, and that's really unusual for a city-owned campground. We can confirm that some of our neighbors have been here for a while. One of our neighbors even had a chicken coop set up outside their RV. We found a nice level pull-thru site that was great for our one-night stay.

We took a hike around the park, and were just a little unsettled to find a permanent carport with the word "SNAKES" on it. What's that about?!?

Then we found out that the Lometa Diamondback Jubilee is held in this park every March. Diamondbacks aren't referring to jewelry--they'll be displaying diamondback rattlesnakes under that awning. You know it's a remote place when they celebrate rattlesnakes!  As we took a walk around the soccer fields and baseball diamonds, we're glad to know that it is too chilly for diamondbacks to be out today.

The real reason for this stop is to visit an even more remote place--Colorado Bend State Park. They don't have RV camping at this state park, and we probably wouldn't have driven the motor home the 18 miles out of the way to camp there any way. But the 34-miles of trails inside the park enticed us to make the drive in the pickup for a remote day trip.

We assume that this is one of the least-visited of the many Texas state parks we have experienced. There was no one at the entry gate, and the park office is another six miles inside the park. As we drove along the gravel road that led to the park, we caught sight of movement in the tall grass.

This coyote came out to the road to give us a nice greeting to Colorado Bend State Park.

We chose a six-mile trail that would take us to some of the park highlights. One of those highlights is Gorman Falls. A picture on the signboard showed a spring picture of the falls on a wet year.

Our January picture of Gorman Falls on a dry year was a little less impressive.

This state park is named for its position at a bend of the Colorado River. Our hike took us down to the river for another picture.

Our loop hike took us along the river, with the steep cliffs beside us.

We saw that this was the destination for a recent American Volkssport Association hike. This group was established in 1976, and is patterned after a walking group that was chartered in Germany. They sponsor stress-free noncompetitive walks of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) and 5 kilometers (3.1 miles). The American Volkssport organization hosts around 3,000 walking events each year, and the loop we did just happens to be one of their routes last year.

We bought our annual Texas State park pass at this remote location. We're struggling to find new places to visit, since we've made this drive to south Texas so many times before. Some times we have to stop in some pretty remote parks in some pretty remote parts of Texas to find some place we haven't been before.