Houston Campout – June 2015

Jun 28, 2015 Abel Longoria Camping, Meetups 0

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This is our first Texas Vanagons Houston Area Campout and we chose Huntsville State Park since its a short drive from Houston. We’ve had a couple of campouts in the Austin area and this was our first try for Houston. I got to the park Friday afternoon at about 1pm and the place was already packed with families! All of the prime spots had already been taken but I managed to find 2 good spots with plenty of parking space to accommodate our vans. I forgot how quick these parks fill up in the summer since school is out.

Nathan and Kevin planned to come out to the park on Saturday morning so I was flying solo Friday night. I got to work around the van a bit and do a bit of cleaning from the long California road trip we took a couple of months ago. One of the things I got to check was to see how my ghetto rigged CLK wheel center caps held up. Since these caps don’t snap in as firmly as others do I was worried these may pop off on a long drive but they stayed put just fine. Pheew!

This is the custom cabinet I built for Libby. It is still a work in progress and I hope to have it completed in the couple of weeks. All I lack is trimming out that front drawer and finishing and mounting a small kick out side table for the cabinet. So far I’m very pleased with the results. Once its 100% complete I’ll make a blog post on the entire process.

Saturday I got company! Nathan in his 1990 Carat with a newly installed South African front headlight and lower grills installed. Gotta love the South African grills!

Kevin and his 1987 Westfalia Camper. He too just recently installed the South African headlight kit. I know for awhile all of the vendors were sold out and these kits were on back order for the longest time. Its good to see they’re available again.
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Alex, a friend of mine from Lake Jackson drove up and spent the day with us to look at our vans and figure out what to look for when buying one. He currently doesn’t own a Vanagon but is in the market for one so between myself, Nathan and Kevin we answered all of his questions. At the end of the day I’m not sure if we talked him into buying one or talked him out of it. Lol.

After camping in California, Utah and Colorado this past spring and having to run my Webasto heater at night I forgot how hot it can get in Texas. Lol. And its only JUNE! Even though it was hot we had to have a camp fire at night, ya know, for the effect oh and CAMP CORN! Even though it was 90 degrees out at night we still had a fire and all 3 of us sat about 15 feet from it.

I know when we camp Libby gets a ton of looks and attention at the campgrounds since she clearly stands out amongst the cookie cutter RV’s that are very typical today. This campout we had 3 vans total so they drew a whole lot more attention. Lots of people stopped by for photos and a few came over to take a peek inside.

Besides the heat the campout was a lot of fun. It’s nice to camp with other Vanagon owners because it becomes a huge tech talk session. Everyone shares info on what they’ve done or how they fixed something that has broken which is great information to absorb so when (not “if” lol) yours breaks you know the remedy. It’s definitely a great learning experience.

I very rarely find myself following another Vanagon especially here in Texas so I definitely had to get a photo of Kevin’s van as we ventured out of the park Sunday morning. We plan to have a few more area camp outs but next on tap is a July Houston Area Meetup.

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• camping, houston, meetups, vanagon

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