One thing we've noticed, this place has some big
creepy spiders
ugly like
poisonous, like deadly
We pulled in and there's this big
spider sitting there on a web
Kind of black and yellow and really creepy looking made a lasting impression on Michelle that same night. She had a
nightmare
Big spider chasing me! Size of a rat she said
It was chasing you? Yeah, the whole dream, is was big, puffy, gross
big and puffy
Somebody else coming in here at Lake Whitney Thousand Trails. Not a bad place to stay.
Laundry today
Kind of takes away from your time trying to work. Gonna close the gray tank here. I always leave it open
Because when you're doing, especially four loads of laundry
That'll fill up your gray tank pretty quickly.
oh
let's see, we've been here in Texas for two weeks now
Michelle and I really only get to explore on the weekends since we work during the week. Our first
weekend we explored down to Waco, Texas and visited Magnolia market
We're gonna see Chip and Joanna
Didn't know if you knew that, but their close friends of ours
Just sayin'. Hey, there's a farmers market or something going on over there
It's also a Baylor University football game today too, in town.
I'm a checker. She's a checker!
Waco, Texas Magnolia Market
Kind of like we're at a fair!
Where we at? The shop. The shop, we're in the shop, can you tell?
Yep, we're in the shop!
Still haven't found Chip and Joanna. Surely they aren't just gonna.
I think they ditched us!
I mean, we're such good friends.
They've never ditched us before
Probably because we've never seen or met them before. Maybe that's why. That could be why.
Silo baked goods, wonder how long the line is?
Oh heck no!
More sweet tea!
Smells lemony.
How was that lemon lavender cupcake? Oh my gosh!
Well, I like about anything lemon but this was lemon lavender. It was very good though
That was a good time. I'm glad we stopped there. Oh!
At Magnolia market, it's definitely worth a stop. Yeah, they have a really nice setup
Very family-friendly, you know, they have the games that set up in the yard area. Mm-hmm. Really fun
I really hope I don't fall. Well, you be nice and maybe you won't. Yeah and then, so we're leaving
Magnolia market, Michele got her phone out as she always does and starts doing some research
She looked up the Waco mammoth National Park, was looking at other things to do in the Waco area and found
Dr. Pepper museum. Did you know that dr. Pepper was founded in Waco, Texas? I did not know this
Why not stop there?
From there, we went to the Waco mammoth
National Park, which was really, I'm glad we went there, that was really neat. That was definitely worth it
It was only five dollars a person we got in just in time
That was like their last tour of the day cuz they closed their last tours at 4:30 and we like got there
4:35 and they let us in. The tour guide was very informative. Very very
What we've been uncovering are fossils of Ice Age animals
And the Ice Age down here in the South is a lot different than what y'all are having in, Iowa
I don't know where y'all are from. Virginia
definitely
Yeah, so you guys well, Iowa you would have had some grapes. Yeah. Yeah, because that's where you're like since you've come from
Virginia you guys would have been
I see sometimes but not that frequently down here. It was never I see like yeah, Texas
It's never been cold. Not once
So
really if you went
Down the west coast and then cut over from California to Florida that pulled boomerang-shaped you had this really open
grassland really temperate zone
and
here in this part of the state
We had cut low seasonality is what they call it today
We have really hot summers surprisingly cold winters back. Then the temperatures were more even
So you could pick any day the year odds were really good. It would be 60 to 70 degrees. It's pretty nice
Yeah, what you feel right now. We have Colombian mammoths, and then those great lakes in New England area
They had woolly mammoths. So your typical wooly
Males would be about 10 feet tall the shoulder
the Colombians that we find here to get upwards of 14 feet tall at the shoulder and
They have been found all through North America
But there are only two sites that have bunches up with us and there's a site up in South Dakota Wow
Yep, the South Dakota site was a sinkhole
They've been digging down into that sinkhole
They have found 61 so far every single one of them's male
females were really good at avoiding dangerous areas and that tells us when we have a group of females like this that there was something
Really bad that happened something that was unavoidable
Because you know if you've got something like a saber-toothed cats lair, you know
They're hanging out in caves ferrules know that they can avoid it
This had there been something that they could not predict the City of Waco
acquired the land and
Made a basically handshake agreement with the university because Baylor had been digging this out
They said, you know we can team up if you move the bones out
We can fill up the whole build you a little interpretive center right here. You run that museum
we'll run the park around it and we'll open up to the public and so
they were moved everything out in 1990 and then the city decided to
Rent a backhoe to pull dirt from over here to fill up the hole found another mammoth, and that's how we ended up with 50
So we formed a nonprofit
organization and they raised the funds for this building and so we were able to protect pit -
This is one of only two
climate-controlled dig sites in the u.s. At 70 degrees year-round
And we tried to leave the bones exactly where we uncovered them
Nine times out of ten when we find an animal here. It's in the position at late-day only a thousand years ago
Yeah, so we have been digging from April 1978 all the way up to present
You're gonna see basically where we're at after 41 years in here
You walk every single day but you just
All of them have been elsewhere in the park to
Talk about an acre we have found 23 vaneless and then we have about 10 more acres of this deposit that we need to
Yeah, that's just this live-action time this is actual size
Yeah, Asian elephants would be not much shorter than a wooly right here at the chin. So Asian elephant wooly mammoth
African
Elephants
Diamond-shaped opening you got yourself a female and diamonds are a girl's best friend. Remember the difference?
this tough
We've got the left one still on site
Going into the crown the right one and actually got removed and it's been set aside for today
The toss grow in increments if you take the tusks and cut it lengthwise, you'll see lines in there
There's one line per season. Yeah, so you can tell from one season to the next how that animal was doing
Yeah, and with girls you can tell every single time she was pregnant
When they were in digging all of this out
You can kind of see the tracks this high pile over here is all the backfill that they took from down here
The difference
For smile we're staying at Thousand Trails Lake Whitney and
It's
They're doing a lot of renovations around here. The pools seems really nice. They have two pools, but one of them is closed
Grounds. It's spread out over a big area
Very large kind of secluded all the campground like a B and C area
They're all kind of secluded
From each other. There's a lot of sites that have trash bags over the electrical posts
They're installing new ones and ours happens to be a new post a little bit away from everything
there's a little town of Whitney that has a few stores and
Whitney is only a population of about 2000
Average small town kind of gives you a little bit of insight about the campground your buddy. Talk about our buddy
Hey gray, anything see anything?
You see
Like that
Seems really nice they have two pools, but one of them is closed. I've got a cat rubbing my leg very friendly. I
Don't know where that cat came from. I don't out of the trash. I'm standing here talking
I swear that cat was in that trash can
You working today?
Like Whitney Dan