Camper Life Archives - Hitching Time

HitchingTime
Oct, Fri, 2023

Tres Rios RV Resort – Campground Review

A couple of months ago we signed up for a free weekend at another campground in the Glen Rose area campground called Tres Rios RV Resort. We were initially scheduled to camp in February but due to weather conditions, we postponed it until this weekend.

Tres Rios RV Resort is a private campground. Meaning that it is not open to the public. Why is this important you may ask? Think of this for a minute. Since 2019, first time RV owners have skyrocketed. There were nearly four million more RV owners between 2019 and 2020 alone! As the number of RV owners grows, the availability for RV spots decreases. In that same time frame there was only a 1.7% increase in RV parks. That means there are a bunch of new families looking to camp and only a very slight increase in place for them to camp.

To break that down even more, of the 15,462 campgrounds in the US as of 2022, approximately half of those are available to the public. Making the available spots for the 86 million households that own a camper to camp in even smaller.

On top of all of that, spot rent for campgrounds have about doubled in the past five years. Spots that averaged about $30-35 a night, now are about $60-70 a night. There are some campgrounds that are booked out for over a year!

The Park

Tres Rios is located just outside of Glen Rose, TX, the “dinosaur capital of the world”! It sits on 47 acres where the Brazos, Paluxy Rivers and Squaw Creek come together. It is actually where it got its name from. Tres Rios means Three Rivers.

RV Spots and Rentals

The park has 238 RV spots, 19 cabins, and 5 cottages. All RV spots have full hook ups and 90% of which have 30 and 50 amp service. The RV spot that we stayed in was approximately 25×70, which appears to be about what most of the spots are. Some are smaller, some are a little bigger. The spots are also perpendicular to the roads, making it a little hard to park compared to ones that are slanted, but not by much. A large majority of them are pull through sites as well.

Playground

Along with the large number of RV spots and cabins, there are a ton of things to do to keep you and/or your kids busy while you are camping there. They have a fairly decent playground that has two playground areas with a slide, climbing wall and several swings. There are also several climbing tires that are buried in the ground and a large tractor tire that has been painted and made into a large sand pit.

I spoke with our point of contact this weekend and she said that there is a new playground that is scheduled to be installed this year, around summer time, that is going to be a lot better. It will be a large playground system with several slides, swings and other playground items, and the best part is that it will all be covered.

I wonder what else is planned this year…

Pool

There is a pool located at the back of that park. It isn’t the biggest pool I’ve seen at campgrounds but it is there to swim in. It was built in 1919 by the YWCA. At the time it was the first and the largest inground pool built in Texas. At the time of this post, it is closed so I was not able to go into the fenced area of the pool but from the looks of it, it is about 30’x60’. It ranges in depth from 3’ at one end to 8’ deep where the drain is and the back to 6’ at the far end. At the shallow end of the pool, there is a covered area where parents can sit and watch their kids in the pool. It also serves as an area for a screen for pool time movies! The pool is open from April until October(?)

Yard Games

At the back end of the park, there is a large circle driveway where all the activity area is. In the middle of the circle drive is a volleyball net, tether ball, and several horseshoe pits. It is also the area where they have cornhole tournaments and other yard game events.

Activities at the Park

One of the things that I love about Tres Rios over some of the other parks that we have stayed at, Granted it is only a couple that we have stayed at so far, is that they have planned activities everyday! There is an organized kids activity Wednesday through Sunday at 9am, cards/games everyday at 2pm, Bingo every Friday, cornhole tournaments on Thursdays and the list just goes on and on! You can check out their activities calendar on their website.

On Site Restaurant

During the middle of the year, there is an on site restaurant that serves breakfast on the weekends. We have not had the chance to try this out because it wasn’t open yet at the time of this post, but we will give it a shot when it does open. The building, however, is a very nice building. There is seating for about 75 people or so. The decor inside is an industrial rustic vibe. Stone walls with an open rounded roof which is bare to the inside and hardwood floors. The air conditioning ducts are exposed giving the industrial feel to it.

The Cost

Tres Rios is one of nine properties owned by Ocean Canyon Properties. All of which are included in your membership. You can goto the Tres Rios website and fill out the form on the page or call the number listed and get a free 3 day, 2 night stay. The only “catch” to it is that you have to attend a sales appointment which lasts anywhere from 90 to 120 minutes. In this meeting they will show you the park, show you all the other parks that are in the network, and the benefits of having a membership.

A couple days before we went on our free weekend, we looked at the reviews of the park on several different websites. These reviews ranged anywhere from six months to 10 years old. A bunch of the reviews stated that their sales person was very pressuring and that when they turned down the membership they were rude to them the rest of the weekend. We honestly had second thoughts about going just by reading the reviews.

I am very glad that we did though!

Our sales meeting lasted about two hours, mainly because my wife and I took a little time to talk after the sales pitch was over. Our sales person was not pushy at all. She was very friendly and was very upfront with us from the very beginning of the meeting that the highest pressure that was going to be put forth is that the offer for the premium membership that included all the parks in the network would expire once the sales meeting was completed. After that, the only option we would be able to get would be for just Tres Rios alone.

When we first heard the total price that the membership cost, we were shocked. However, that shock didn’t last long. They do in house financing for seven years. This makes your monthly payment down to a price that is affordable. I’m not going to put what our price was because your price may be different than mine because of discounts and how much we put down, etc. I will say that the price per month that we are paying is less than a weekly price at many of the other campgrounds that we have looked at! At the average price of daily campsites, it would only take 5 days to more than cover the monthly payment.

Our Plans

One of the limitations that we had prior to getting this membership was having to budget and save for a month to pay for the campsite when we wanted to go camping. This limited us to only about one weekend a month that we could go because it would cost us about $150-180 for a three day weekend camping trip in just the site alone.

With this membership, we can stay at Tres Rios for up to three weeks at a time. Another bonus to this is that it is only about five minutes from my work. Will we jump right in staying three weeks at a time right now, no, but the option is there. This option will be especially good during the summer when the pool is open. For now, we will shoot for a week or two a month and work up there.

Once we decide to go full time RVing, Tres Rios will be perfect for us since it is so close to my work and with my schedule, I would only have a long commute about two days a month. We are so ready to take this step and hopefully, one day soon, our dream will come true.

Final Thoughts

We were very skeptical before we went after reading all the reviews we did, but I am so glad that we decided to go. I told my wife, worst case scenario, we get a free weekend and have to waste two hours listening to someone talk and we get a blog post to write. I am glad that I was wrong, and that all the reviews we read were either outdated or incorrect.

Would we recommend going to Tres Rios and getting a membership? Absolutely! The gains of the membership is worth so much more than the price tag that is required.

Until new time…

Happy Camping

NOTE: This post was posted earlier this year(2023) when we first started our blog. I am posting old post first to get caught up to the present and then I will start putting up new posts.

HitchingTime
Oct, Fri, 2023

General

Our First Storm In Our RV

I always knew that it would happen eventually, Tonight it did. Tonight we had our first Severe Thunder storm in our camper. We got about an hour of solid downpour and about twenty minutes of pea sized hail. Let me tell you what though, that pea sized hail, sounded a whole lot bigger on the roof of our camper.

We have like that next three or four months planned out on when we will be camping. Basically we will be doing just shy of three weeks in our camper and about nine days at home for the forseeable future. So canceling our plans is not really in the cards. Granted we could if we wanted to but honestly what is the point?

Weather Forcast

We are planning to live in our RV full time as soon as we are able to sell our house. At that point, we wont have the option to cancel our camping plans, because then it will be living plans. Also, I am still working full time so where we camp has to be with in a reasonable distance from my work. We really cant say, “Well it looks like it is going to rain for the next four days, lets go stay at a different campground.” That campground might be more than an hour drive to my work and I really dont want to drive that far for my job.

This is what the ten day forcast looked like on the day before we went camping…

The first day we were here, IT WAS HOT!! It made it up to about 95 with about 50% humidity on May 5th! About 5pm, the rain came in. It wasn’t really a storm, just a good steady rain. That was on Friday.

On Saturday, it showed a chance of rain again, and as I looked at an updated on Saturday morning, the forcast had changed to this…

Through out the day, I kept checking on the radar looking for when the rain would hit. It started out being forcast to hit about 4pm, then it got moved back to 6pm, then to 8pm and finally around 10pm.

It Has Arrived!

This time the metorologists finally got the prediction right because it started raining…and raining…and raining some more. Then the pinging started, and got more and more frequent until it seemed to be hailing more than it was raining.

There is a open air pavilion at the camp ground that we are staying at and people often take their vehicles down to it when a severe storms moves in. About the time that the hail started was about the time that I started to see headlights come on and people moving their vehicles down. My thoughts though, even if I was to move my truck it would still get hit and even though the pings we were hearing sounded like golf balls, it was only about pea sized. So why get out and get soaking wet and more than likely get stuck in my truck for a couple hours or even sleep in it and leave my wife with our kids.

She was scared enough as it was with me being here to comfort her, I cant imagine what she wouldve felt if I wasnt. No vehicle is worth that.

The Icing On The Cake

About ten minutes into the rain, the power went out! That meant only a few lights, no fans, and of course, no A/C! As I am writing this at about midnight, it has dropped down to 64 degrees, thank goodness, but when the power went out, it was still in the 80’s! So it has gotten a little warm in here and a little stagnat as well with no air moving.

Thankfully we are in the county that I work for, so I know where to look to find information. I know who the power company is here. The average person here, wont know that kind of stuff. So they are basically just left in the dark in more ways than one. I know that I can pull up a website and see the area affected by the outage, how many people are without power, the status of repairs and en ETA of when it will be back up. Unfortunately, as I am writing this about midnight, the ETA for repair is about 2:45AM.

Bless all the electrical workers that go out in these storms and work with electricity to get peoples power back on. If it was me, no way I would be out in pouring rain working on eletrical lines. So thank you to all those linemen and women out there that are willing and very capable of doing just that!

Round One

We have had two rounds of storms come through already tonight, after the first one went through, my wife and I went outside to survey our vehicles and the stuff we had up outside. Things like our grill, chairs and our octogol screened collapsable gazebo. Thankfully there was any damages that we could find, however, the gazebo was collapsed, and thankfully one of the support straps was attached to a fence, otherwise who knows where it wouldve ended up.

We got the tent set back up and got it staked down, hopefully a little better and gathered all the chairs that were under it and any other loose items that were now scattered all over our camp site. We got everything layed down and put up next to our camper so when the next storm hit, at least they wouldnt be just sitting in the middle of the yard. It really surprised me though because even though, the tent was callasped and flung over about ten feet, the chairs were still sitting in the same spot that we left them an hour or so before.

On one hand, I fell like we did the right thing by setting the tent back up, putting some corkscrew stakes in the gound to anchor it with and retightening everything. On the other hand though, I think maybe we shouldve just taken it down and stuck it in the pass through of the trailer. We also have the side covers on our gazebo tent so, I also wonder, if those werent on it, would it have allowed enough air to pass through that it wouldnt have collapsed?

Round Two

After the first round ended and we got the yard picked up and all of our things gathered, round two hit. Thankfully the second wave was nowhere near as big or as powerful as the first wave. I only hear a handful of hail pings and the rain was not as bad as the first wave.

Our gazebo made made it through the second wave of the storm with only one side collapsing, but it is still standing. We have one more wave to go through before this system passes and we are in the clear.

Halleluh!

The power just came back on! It scared the crap out of me when the A/C kicked back on but that is one scare that I will gladly take!

I don’t know what the rest of the night wil have in store for us. The radar prediction shows that there might be another line of storms move through about 3am, but I’m not sure I trust it. The first wave that came though, the radar prediction showed to be about half the size that it turned out to be. The second and third wave of storms, it didn’t even have.

Now we are winding down on the third wave of storms, the power is back on, and the tent outside, is still somewhat standing. So I think that I am going to go and try and get some sleep and tomorrow, I will continue this with what we found out in the day light

The Next Day

Our kids slept through the whole night with the exception of a bathroom break. They were totally oblivious to everything that happened. Honestly, thank goodness for that. The bad part about it is that they woke up at about 7 am, honestly a little early for going to sleep at 2am but up we got.

Everything was soaking wet and dirty with leaves and twigs and dirt! We put everything out in the sun to dry off and straighten out and made sure our gazebo tent was staked down well. Overall, it held up really well and only collapsed the first time. The second and third time only the side that we didn’t have staked down collapsed but the tent as a whole stayed up and anchored.

There was a shoe deep puddle outside our front door but by late afternoon it was pretty well dried up. All in all, everything made it through okay.

Something We Have To Get Use To

Storms are something we are going to have to get use to, honestly. Once we are able to sell our house and we live in an RV full time, we won’t have the option to go anywhere else when a storm is predicted to come through because of my job. Once I’m able to retire, then that might be a different story, but until then, we just have to live through it.

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this post. Please subscribe to our email list to get emails on when we publish a new update on our adventures. We hate spam as much as you do, so we promise to never sell or otherwise distribute your contact information with anyone! To sign up, simply fill out the form below. Once you click submit, check your email and you will need to verify that you were the one to sign up for our email list.

We would hate it, but, at any time, if you do not wish to receive emails from us for whatever reason, there is a link at the bottom of every email that will unsubscribe you from our email list.

Until it’s time to hitch up the camper again,

Happy Camping!

NOTE: This post was originally posted earlier this year(2023) when we first started our blog. I am reposting all of our old posts to get caught up to the present and then I will start writing new ones.