A bad case of Blue Elbow.

Texas Welcome Center, Orange, Texas.  Texas has bayous, too.

We stayed overnight here.  It was fine.  Really.  I said it was fine.  Kind of loud, very crowded, but we felt safe and slept fairly well.  

We New York Ducks aren't used to rest areas being interesting or pretty.  We're satisfied if the toilets flush.  This is why we keep going Oooh, what a pretty potty break this was!  Such a beautiful truck stop!  New York State has set the bar for public interstate bathrooms so low that other states cannot help but excel.  You can't spend the night there, and the upside is, you don't want to.

Squee!  Texas has nice necessaries!

Blue Elbow Swamp

I swear to you there is a bird in this picture.  I just can't find it.

Can you see the alligator?

Annie spotted him first.

My first feral alligator!  RAWR!
(I didn't mean to scare you)

When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up.

We are also not tortoises, please.

The three of us are also not tortoises, too.

Never drop a toaster into the swamp.

This is a chicken.

We've settled into a longish-term RV park here in Orange.  People seem to be living here;  it's a working-class neighborhood in the middle of a ranch.  Boondocking opportunities here around Orange are abysmal.    We'll stay a few days, see about seeing relatives, then head on to greener pastures ... literally.

Water under the natural bridge

I got tingly reading about this park:  a river (the Santa Fe) tumbling along like rivers do, then PLUNGING into a sinkhole to travel underground for three miles before it GUSHES back to the surface and resumes its riverly ways.  I couldn't imagine what that would look like!  Can you?

At great personal danger I recorded this phenomenon for you to enjoy.  You will feel the exact rush of wind and see the current raging in real time, more or less, but exactly as we saw it.

Hold on, Annie!  I'll pull you back from the rushing waters! Grab that Styrofoam cup full of lead.  Notice her hair getting unkempt from the winds.

Lies

This is a beautiful natural area, with lots of wildlife.  When you get to the sinkhole, you'll know only because there's no more river.  If you happen to know which way to go, you can walk three miles and be there when the river re-emerges and continues flowing into the Suwanee.  I think it looks sort of like the sinkhole, but backwards.

Creepy part:  Divers have explored the three miles of underground river.

Interesting part:  we met a man on the trail who told us we had passed alligators on the river rocks!

Can you see it?

We couldn't either, until he pointed it out:

 

Once we knew how to look, we saw them everywhere.

NOW I get it.

The O'Leno (say "oh LEE no") State Park benefited big time from the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).  

 

I hadn't realized they replanted forests and fought wildfires.

Here's Annie, with a cypress slice for scale:

The dot at the middle is the cypress as a seedling when Genghis Khan did notable stuff, like killing Kirk's son.  KHAN!!!  Eight hundred years later, here's Annie.  A lot has happened.

Eat your heart out, Tucker.  We got nuthin' BUT cute.