How the Journey Began

I have always wanted to retire on a lake in the Texas Hill Country. Well, at least since Winnie told me we weren't going to retire to a cabin in the mountains in Colorado. No more snow, I was told. We had been looking at lots on Texas Hill Country lakes since the late 1990's. Every time we would travel out to the Hill Country, we would look at lots, see something we liked, and get cold feet about plunking down the money. We even made an annual trek to Mystic Shores on Canyon Lake, until there really weren't any remaining lots that we wanted.

On our last trip to Mystic Shores, we saw a billboard we had not seen before for Ensenada Shores on Canyon Lake. We decided to give it a visit. It's on the south side of the lake, just down the road on FM 2673 past the booming town of Startzville, TX (don't blink). You will know it's a booming Texas town because it has a Dairy Queen.


We pulled into the parking lot where the development company (Warner Group) had set up shop in a trailer. We were shortly greeted by Riley P. Galloway, a graduate of Southwest Texas University (now Texas State) not too many years earlier. No roads were cut into the property yet, so Riley piled us into his four-wheel drive truck and we got the (somewhat bumpy)grand tour of Ensenada Shores, circa 2004.

The land had previously belonged to a cattle rancher who passed away, and his heirs sold off the property. It was pretty rough looking back then, but when we were standing on lot 50 on what would later become 120 Ladera Vista, we got the bug. As nervous as we were, we signed the contract and in July, 2004 we became property owners in Ensenada Shores. The journey had begun.