Eastward Ho!

It's September 16, 2016 and we are slides in, wheels down.  We are departing Borger, Tx and getting on TX-287.  This road will angle us to the south and east, eventually paralleling the Texas, Oklahoma border.  We don't have a solid idea of where we will end up for the night, we're going to drive for about 4 hours and see where it gets us.

For us, TX-287 is the road of our life.  Towns like Clarendon, Memphis, Childress, Chilicothe, and Vernon are little more than wide spots in the road that don't even earn a mental note for the average traveler.  But for those of us that made the pilgrimage to Dallas over and over again from our youth in the back seats of our parent's 1950's-something land yachts to our young adult years in our college student "rides", these towns marked the progress towards our goal.  We knew where we would stop for gas.  We knew where the bathrooms were.  Remember, there was a time when there was not a fast food chain store every mile with a shiny bathroom.  You had to be really careful or you could end up in a place that would give you tetanus just by looking in.

But today instead of following TX-287 all the way into Dallas we are going turn due east on TX-82 just a short ways outside of Wichita Falls.  As we make the transition to TX-82 we are approaching 4 hours of drive time so we are going to look for a place to set up housekeeping for the night.  Henrietta is the first town we come to and as is so typical for small Texas towns, they have a city park (Hapgood Park) with a couple strips of pull thru sites with full hookups.  This is really, really nice.  We wish Borger's city park was set up so well.

RV campground is alongside the Hapgood Park ball fields.

There is one oddity about this campground's layout, the utilities are set way forward on the site.  We had to pull so far forward that the bedroom was hanging out into the road a little bit.  The truck had to be disconnected and brought around and parked behind trailer.  But this got us in position so that all of our cables and hoses would reach without multiple extensions.

Wide open spaces.  Odd parking arrangement with rig-forward position.

We took advantage of the remaining daylight and went to have a look at our host town.  Henrietta has a classic town square with the county courthouse set in the middle.  Clay County came into being in 1857 when it was separated from Cooke County.  Henrietta is one of the oldest settled communities in north-central Texas.

Clay County Courthouse

In 1860 Henrietta represented the far western edge of Anglo expansion in north-central Texas. Native Americans remained a viable threat for current and future residents. Throughout the early 1860's it was essentially under continuous attacks from local tribes.  The town was eventually abandoned just before the Civil War and there were no permanent settlers again until 1870.  A post office opened in 1874 and the railroad came to town in 1882 and that solidified Henrietta's existence.

As we have criss-crossed the country the past few years we have enjoyed a cavalcade of murals.  Most celebrate a community's history and Henrietta is no different.  Although I think that at just 3100 residents it is more mural per capita than anywhere we have been.

There were many mural's to choose from but we liked this one because it had all the cattle brands.

We went old-school for dinner and ate at the Dairy Queen.  This place was probably built in the 1950's and as best we could tell it had never been remodeled.  And based on the looks we got from people coming in while we were eating, they knew we weren't from there.

After dinner we needed to find someplace to get fuel.  That's another thing about towing only four hours a day.  Big Gulp, the truck, uses about 35 gallons of diesel in that amount of time and with a 50 gallon tank it means that if we start each day with a full tank we do not have to find a station with big rig isles.  And that also gives us the ability to shop for price.  Tonight we found a place place called The Pecan Shed.  Wow, what a cool place.

The Pecan Shed

 In addition to having decent priced diesel fuel, this place has pecans any way you can think of.  Plus a fudge shop, plus a sandwich shop, plus jams and jellies and Texas-themed curios.  I had my way with all the samples they had sitting out everywhere and Cyndee found a few curios items that she could not live without.

Everything pecan and Texas curios at the Pecan Shed

So now we are fueled up and filled up.  We'll get a night's rest and be ready for our next leg of the journey tomorrow.