This could be such a nice park and I wanted to like it; I really tried. Sites are well-cared-for and lavishly spacious, and all the equipment is in working order. The showers and bathrooms are clean and everything works; all pretty unusual for such an urban setting. And there are tons of birds for the watching!

The problem is about 10% of the people (I cannot call them campers) who use it and ruin it for the rest. Coming for a chilly six days in February, I was very fortunate (or so I thought) to get a prime waterfront site. All went well until Friday night when everything went downhill in a hurry. Bongo drums being played outdoors at 11 pm, loud music at all hours, children screaming in the streets until 11 pm or later, plastic trash being burned in the firepits, and worst of all, a perfect parade of total strangers using my quiet lakefront back yard as their personal fishing grounds.There are many fine places to catch fish that are not twenty feet behind someone's camper, yet no fewer than eight different sets of people fished there, not one asked me if it was all right, and each party left a liberal scattering of trash of all kinds... and that was just on Saturday! The crowning indignation was finding Sunday morning that a whole family had parked their car in my neighbor's driveway and pitched a tent for themselves and their two little boys on the lake edge not twenty feet from my little camper. Maybe they couldn't afford the $17 camping fee after making payments on their brand-new shiny black Cadillac Escalade. My heart bleeds.

I called the office and personnel were very apologetic but it took over 40 minutes for someone to come down and by that time the family had swiftly and expertly packed up and cleared out, leaving a pile of trash that took the nice ranger a good half hour to clean up.

On Monday morning I went down to the fishing pier to take one last look at the shorebirds and couldn't even walk all the way out for the (literally) piles of trash, fast food wrappers, worm dirt dumped out on the walk, snarls of fishing line, bare hooks lying about, half-eaten sandwich, I could go on and on.

I will never camp here again, at least until Park personnel begin to address these problems more vigorously. Apologies are fine but they don't address the problem, which is disregard for rules and lack of respect for property, be it the State's or mine, and a definite lack of vigilance and enforcement of those values. Fix it, Texas!