Lake Somerville State Park and Trailway Texas State Parks

Good morning, YouTube! Welcome to Dude RV. I sure appreciate you stopping by this morning. It is April 11th, 2021. The skies are blue, the birds are singing, Ms. V's loaded and ready to get on the road. That's right, we've got another fantastic adventure. Actually, this is a week-long journey. Solo! Yappy's foot is still, she's still having problems with the foot from our last adventure where she sprained the ankle. So, she has opted to stay at home base and send me out on this mission solo. So, Ms. V, the little white truck, and little Red, so we're headed down to Lake Somerville. And right now, today, we are headed to the Birch Creek unit of Lake Somerville State Park. So, let's get on the road. We got a long drive ahead of us. Let's go to Lake Somerville State Park. Man, what a drive! We are here, Somerville Lake State Park, Birch Creek unit. We have arrived. Took almost seven hours. Of course, I did stop and visit with my daughter and family on the way down and stop and got gas and yada, yada, yada. But I'm here. Site number 10. Nice little site, but it is backwards. Porch faces the street, but that's all right. And I'll show you why that's all right momentarily. Number one, there's not going to be a whole, whole lot of traffic here. It's Sunday. So, I'm here for three nights, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, which are typically the slowest Texas State Park days. It's 82 degrees. Site number 10. Pretty flat, pretty level. I did throw down the yellow blocks just to make sure because the asphalt pad is kind of crumbly. We're at 30 and 50. Water. I'm also going to visit the other side of the lake. A couple of Corps of Engineers parks while I'm here. Rocky Point. And I noticed a warning on the recreation.gov for Rocky Point. There are Argentinian ants in that campground. So, I have put out the tras aside and I'm keeping stuff up off the ground because they may be here as well. Lots of thick brush at the back. There may be a trail that goes down to the water there, but there's one maintained closer, not too far away. Fire pit. Picnic table on a concrete pad. The ubiquitous lantern hook. It's just after four o'clock. I'm whooped, so I'm not going to pull out Little Red and do a scooter tour. That'll be for tomorrow. But I am going to do a little exploration. Number one, I got to find some firewood. I have a place to burn it. So, I'm going to have a fire. So, stay tuned. More to come. Lake Somerville State Park. I don't really have a fishing dock anymore. I got a jetty that sticks out in the water. It looks like there's a lot of people trying to catch some crappie. Now, they do have a fairly sizable boat ramp if you have a boat. A two-laner. All right, let's go see some more stuff. Lake Somerville State Park. Birch Creek Unit. We've got a number of group pavilions. If you're going to have a big family gathering, you might consider this. This one's interesting because it looked like at one point there was a shade structure that is no longer here. All right, let's go see some more stuff. So, it is spring in Texas, and that means lots of beautiful bluebonnets. And, I mean, just check out this. This is such a beautiful scene. You got the beach, and you got the bluebonnets. Lake Somerville State Park. Birch Creek Unit. I'm enjoying this one. Lake Somerville State Park. This is a really nice park. Lots and lots of beach. There are a lot of people down here fishing. Where are we? Oh, Lake Somerville State Park. Birch Creek Unit. A little opening to the to the lake there. We are in the group trailer pavilion. Let me get spun around here. A nice place to have a family reunion. Howdy. Doing good. How about yourself? Doing good. Doing good. I'm Officer Heather Lee with Parks and Wildlife. Howdy. I'm Dude RV. Nice to meet you. Pleasure to meet you. I see you're on a scooter here. Yes, ma'am. Just checking it out. Is this an electric or is this a motorized scooter? This is an electric scooter. 750 watt hub motor. It is ADA compliant. Okay, awesome. You are aware, though, that some of the trails are not handicap accessible for these, correct? A lot of the trails are not handicap accessible for mobility scooters. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Awesome. Are you camping in the park today? Site number 10. Fantastic. How long are you going to be? Three nights. Oh, all right. That's awesome. Did you just get here today? Got here about four o'clock. Oh, you got here when most of the crowd left. Well, that's how I do my thing. That's pretty smart. Friday and Saturdays, this time of year, it's just better to stay home if you have a home. Right. Because everybody and their brother's out here. That's absolutely correct. And it kind of gets in the way of what I do, which... Well, all right. Great meeting you. Pleasure to meet you as well. Visiting with you while you're here. And I hope it's always on good terms. Absolutely. So will you take care, sir? You do the same. Have a great day. So if you're looking to have a family reunion somewhere kind of centralized Texas, this building, I can tell you from personal experience, is fantastic. Air-conditioned. And I know that from personal experience because we had at least one family reunion here years ago. Lake Somerville State Park and Trailway is actually the name of this location. So this is the head of the Trailway. I'm not going to try to navigate that today. Maybe, maybe at another time. But it goes quite a ways back here. And there are primitive campsites so you can take your horses in and camp or walk, I guess. But all the sites over here, I'm in the equestrian camping loop. We have paddocks. A few paddocks. This is not actually one of the nicer. This is one of the more basic equestrian camping loops. This is what I'm accustomed to seeing. Either bad or good. There is water. So there's water, but there's no power. Now there's a lake back here somewhere. I'm not sure how close this gets to the lake. Looking at Google Earth, it looks like maybe pretty close. Are we going to be able to get bobber down here? See, what I really like from what I saw on Google Earth, there's a creek channel. That's Birch Creek right there. So I don't know if I'm going to be able to get bobber down here or not. It's pretty smooth and I've got the wheel dolly set up. I want to get back up in that creek channel over there. It is spring and I understand that the crappie are running. There are not supposed to be any alligators in Lake Somerville. There's a body of water called Flag Pond in the state park boundary that supposedly has alligators. Stay tuned. More to come. Well good morning. Birds are a singing. I heard some kind of big bird up. Not the big bird. I heard a big bird up in that tree. Yesterday I spent all day running around shooting video. Today I have deployed bobber. I'm going to roll on down to the closest water access point. Get up in that cove and see if I can catch some crappie. I'm going to go see if I can catch some crappie. Now I had a conversation with a gentleman yesterday. He said that the white bass were running. The banks and the day use areas were just overloaded with people fishing for white bass this weekend. Yesterday when I was talking to that fellow about the white bass, a bald eagle flew over. He said that he's been watching it for several days, frequenting the shoreline, chasing away the buzzards. That's what I hear up in that tree. The vultures. Chasing away the vultures and eating fish on the bank. Keep your eyes open when you're here at Lake Somerville for the bald eagles. I'm not going to take the 9 down on the boat with me. I'm trying to minimize my gear and I certainly don't want to lose this into the water. I'm going to take the little session and put that on the pipe over the shoulder kind of view. We'll see if we can catch some crappie. Let's go catch some stuff. The camera is set up for the reel. I caught a little drum. That's what we're here for right there. He's too small. Got a good one now. Caught some fish this morning. We've got storms moving in. I'm going to put the little boat away. A little cold front came through this morning about 9 o'clock and that was when the fish stopped biting. I was doing pretty good when I first got out there and then it turned off. There is one thing I wanted to mention. In the spring, if you're new to RV and you're in state park or national park, in the spring all the little birds are nesting. Twice already I have found little birds trying to nest where I don't want them to nest. One was in the back of the truck because I had the hatch open. Back up there where those white rags are, my fish rags started building a nest. I've been closing all my windows. Then I had the lawn chair leaning up against the side of the motorhome yesterday. When I got ready to sit down, there was a full-blown nest in there. They built that nest in just a matter of four hours. Just be advised, make sure if you have slides with slide toppers, make sure you check inside of there before you pull your slide in. If you've left compartments open like I have here, double check because the last thing you want is rotten bird eggs. Lake Somerville State Park, Birch Creek Unit. This is definitely a destination. A little bit off the beaten path for a waypoint, but you know if you've got a couple of days and you're not in any big hurry, then I guess it's kind of convenient. But it is definitely worth a visit. I'm going to say during the week, if you're going to come on the weekend, you want to do it outside of peak season because this park is going to be crammed packed with boaters this weekend. Right now there's probably 10 RVs in this whole campground. I don't know how many sites they have. It's a bunch, but each loop has only two or three people. It's very quiet. Speaking of quiet, I did hear a train horn this morning, but overall I don't hear a lot of road noise. Occasionally you hear the boat out on the water. The only thing you really hear a whole lot of here is bird song. There's just a ton of wildlife in this park. I think I saw a ring-tailed cat this morning. I won't know until I review the footage that's on the camera. It was actually this afternoon when I was trail riding. I saw a bald eagle yesterday. Nearly hit a deer on the scooter. The day use area last night, yesterday evening, full of deer. Just chock full of deer. Great place to see some wildlife. Sites are clean, but they're all very level. I've only seen a handful that I wouldn't feel comfortable pulling the motorhome into. Do know that you're going to need to bring your own firewood. They don't have firewood in the park. They don't have, well they've got a couple of kayaks and canoes for rent, but there's only like, I only saw four or five, not very many. There's no fishing dock. There's a jetty and that's been full every day. Lots of bank access for fishing. It's a nice park. Someone told me yesterday they'd heard that this is the most picturesque park in the Texas State Park System. I don't know about that, but man there's a whole lot of bluebonnets over in that day use area, so that was very pretty. This whole area right now, the bluebonnets are in full swing. If you drive from here to Washington on the Brazos, you're going to see some of the most picturesque homes with fields of bluebonnets in front of them. That was just a fantastic drive. I'll have a video that includes some of that footage. It'll be a couple, I don't know, it won't be too long after this one, but you'll see it. Make sure you subscribe so you can see it. All right, I'm rambling. If this is your first visit to Dude RV, I'd appreciate you considering clicking on the subscribe button. If you've been following along, I am very deeply honored. Thank you so very much. I want to give a specific shout out to my patrons. Thank you very much. I am most honored. All right, y'all come back now, you hear?