Blog 3642 – 10.23.2025

Our First Four Day Stay

Today marks my wife and my first four day stay at our “home away from home” in the East Texas Piney Woods. It gets harder and harder to leave as we both enjoy this place so very much.

There is a little roadside park just inside the city limits of Newton, the count seat of Newton county, which is eleven miles from Bon Wier where our property is. In that park the covered picnic tables are shaded by tall long needle pines that keep the grass and paved roadway through the park carpeted in a thick layer of pine needles. I decided some weeks ago to fill the bed of my pick-up with pine needles each time we went by the park and spread them around our RV camper to solve two problems: tracking sand into the trailer and the need to mow to keep the undergrowth from continually popping up. Three loads during our longer stay this week have gotten me closer to that goal. Once we get our own pine needle landscaping carpet completely installed, our own tall pine trees will keep it refreshed.

We were also able this time to clear what I call a “Mule trail” all the way from our camper to our sweet pond so that we can reach it on our side-by-side Polaris Ranger 500.

Almost three weeks ago we realized another advantage of clearing these trails through our timber property – we had a visitor captured on the game camera pointed at our camper.

If you enlarge the photo you can clearly see it is a buck which is very encouraging to my hunter son who has been concerned that a coyote captured several time on another game camera in a creek bottom further back on the property might scare off the deer population. Not this brave buck it seems nor the two intrepid campers that continue to thoroughly enjoy our stays in The Hundred Acre Wood.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VBc8cdMwahh8Ez1PtYDV8RnD2ZhIwOpx/view?usp=drivesdk

Come Away With Me