In the middle of February of this year (while we were in Canyon Lake), a huge winter storm hit central Texas, where snow that actually sticks to the ground isn’t a very common occurrence. It caused people to lose power and water for days, including my parents and close friends.
“The winter storm plunged large swaths of Texas into subfreezing temperatures and overwhelmed the state’s electricity infrastructure, causing massive power outages. At the height of the crisis, nearly 4.5 million Texas homes and businesses were without power. That’s because nearly half of the total power generation capacity for the main state electricity grid was offline as weather conditions caused failures in every type of power source: natural gas, coal, wind and nuclear. Millions of Texans went days without power.” – The Texas Tribune
It was a little scary, honestly, and knowing that my parents went without power and water for a week made me feel incredibly helpless. Rueben and I were lucky that we only lost power for a couple of hours. Our water pipes did keep freezing and the town ran out of bottled water, so we had to get creative with bringing the hoses in every evening and making sure that the fresh tank in our RV (we were still in the small one), was full.
In order to keep from worrying the whole time, I appreciated the beauty that I don’t get to see very often – snow! I’ve been in snow before, but I’ve never experienced a ‘real’ winter or seen snow stick for this long in Texas before. So, I ate it up!
People normally go tubing on this water, but this week they were using those tubes to sled down the hill!
Our smaller RV didn’t have the best insulation, so our windows froze on the inside! We had to put towels to collect the water from the ice melting. However, since we’ve done some boondocking before, we were pretty prepared for the weather otherwise – we have really warm sleeping bags, a gas generator, a gas heater, and a small electric heater. We also have a couple of 5 gallon water jugs that we made sure to fill up during the day in case our water was cut off.
A couple of people in the RV park put out bird feeders, which brought out some brightly colored birds! It was so awesome seeing the pops of colors from against the blue sky and white snow.
“It’s up to you to find beauty in the ugliest of days”
Next up: a relaxing month in Del Rio before heading to Colorado!
