What to Do in Colorado River Thousand Trails RV Park?

Columbus, TX.   Highs: mid to high seventies   Lows: 40's to 60's

 Site: E-78 new section    AT&T: download 363 (!) upload 48.1.  T-Mobile: download 262, upload 25.2

Colorado River is located in Columbus, TX, population around 3,000 people, so not a lot to do there. Small HEB grocery store, next to a small Walmart neighborhood shopping store. There are a couple of decent restaurants for dining, a decent Mexican restaurant, a Whataburger, and even a steakhouse, which we've never tried. Colorado River is a nice stop to rest, catch your breath, and just chill for a few days. If you like lots to do, then you might find this location a little on the boring side. You could always watch the vultures. With a lot of game in the area, they seem to hang around here a lot! (There are several exotic game ranches in the area.)

Colorado River has a new section of level gravel sites and two other older sections, one up on a hill...with trees for some shade....

and the other down by the Colorado River bank.  

The river is almost dried up in this section by the campground, and the riverbank is super steep, so not a very good view even if you are down by the river. You can't see the river from your site except for a couple of sites further down. So much for a river site, lol. The handicap sites are concrete pads, which is nice. Staff is friendly and helpful....the pool is very small and so is the laundry room. 

There are walking trails, although some uneven, all around the park. Since the new section has been paved, you can ride a bike all around on the newly paved parts and get about 5 miles in for a daily ride if you go around a couple of times. 

new section viewed from up on the hill above

This is the start of a hiking trail, it gets narrower, rockier, but the deer like to mosey around in the woods around it.

Sparky saw several different deer riding the hiking trail today. (It's like a mountain bike trail so you can go through it on a bike.) The deer are quite used to people so they don't immediately take off. This one's ribs are showing quite a bit, hope he or she is not sick!

Another one further into the woods on the hiking trail.....

You can get mail at the park, but they charge you 5.00 per package, so that will put the kibosh on Sparky getting more craft supplies...haha. (Whew! says Eldo. That's a good thing! We are running out of space in the rig!)

One thing you CAN do at this park, while staying here in Columbus, TX, is go see the beautiful painted churches tour. Sparky did this tour on her own a couple of years ago, when Covid was much more prevalent, but the churches were still open at that time for viewing. There are TWENTY painted churches scattered throughout central Texas, but there are about 4-6 of them within an hour's drive from Colorado River TT campground near Schulenberg, TX. They are all inscribed in the National Register of Historic Places and are of European German and Czech influence from the late 1800's to the early 1900's. The immigrants who built these churches didn't have the money of their forebears, so they used paint and plaster and tromp l'oeil ("fool the eye") decorations to mimic marble and gold and other fancy architectural features such as cornices.

St. John the Baptist Church

Here is a link to some of the churches Sparky visited last year. https://whereseldo.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-jaw-droppingly-beautiful-painted.html...The tour if you choose to have a guided one, which is now available after Covid, costs a 50.00 deposit which becomes the guide's fee once you show up. The way Sparky understands it, there is an additional charge depending on how many churches you want to go see with the guide. One of the options was the guide would travel with you in your car. The price was too expensive for the budget, so Sparky decided to forego the tour this time. If you want to go explore on your own, you can do that and there are maps online to guide you. You can buy a map of the churches for 5.00 from the Schulenberg Chamber of Commerce. To see these churches is truly something not to be missed whether you go with a guide or go on your own.

St. Mary's in High Hill, TX

Here is another fantastically beautiful one, another St. Mary's, only this one is in Praha, TX.

Here is St Mary's of the Assumption, in Flatonia, TX.

See? You really do need to take a tour of these amazing churches while you are at Colorado River in Columbus, TX....And as the week draws to a close, we are planning our journey north and west thru Texas to head towards Tucson. (You mean I'M planning the journey! exclaims E.) Yes sir, that's Eldy's job because he's the travel logistician in the family. He does a great job of planning how far to travel each day and where we are going to stop. He researches the parks using the RV Parky app. It's a great app and covers almost all the different types of campgrounds from KOA, to state parks, to Corps of Engineer, to Thousand Trails....Lots of good stuff in the app, check it out! 

It's getting more and more expensive to stay outside our membership parks when we travel, and the average cost is now over 50.00-70.00 a night as opposed to $25-30 when we were traveling full time the last time, over 13 years ago. We look for bargains but decent parks, and that's very difficult to find these days. Since we don't have a generator and we do have a residential fridge that runs down our batteries if we were to try and stay somewhere all night without electrical power, we can't boondock (stay for free overnight) at Walmart or Cracker Barrel-- for now. We are thinking about getting a generator which would enable us to do that. At any rate, it's going to take us three days at least to drive through Texas. Yep, it is truly a HUGE state!  

And with that, we will see you down the road!