We were looking for a warm spot to spend the winter and ended up with so much more. First of all, Texas is HUGE! No surprise there. We came into the state at the far northwest corner on November 10, 2018, at El Paso. We went to several museums in the area, but the most colorful and fun place to visit was the ‘Sugar House’, one man’s 30 year project to build a beautiful home for his wife (he used painted cement).
Next stop was Hueco Tanks State Park, where rock depressions capture rainwater that has been used as a watering stop through the centuries and where we found peccaries roaming, instead of deer and buffalo.
Traveling eastward, we had a beautiful fall hike on a trail in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, that took us to an old cabin in McKittrick Canyon.
Next stop for us was Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, which will be in another post. We headed north a bit to Roswell and then spent Thanksgiving at a wonderful little state park, Bottomless Lakes. It is here that perhaps the ‘birding bug’ started to bite us when we got to watch a little bird called a Least Bittern hunt along a creek bank.
After Thanksgiving, it was time to move south again and we found a wonderful spot to camp near Monahans at the Sandhills State Park. We loved the park, camping amidst the sand dunes, but did not think much of the surrounding area – all oil well related and you could smell petroleum in the air.
We took several barefoot walks in all that sand, which stretched for miles.
And then it was further south, to the wonderful Big Bend National Park, which will have to be in another post. We stayed in tiny Terlingua, just outside the park, and that town is built around the adobe ruins of an old mining town. Some houses have incorporated an adobe ruin into their new house.
At the very southeast edge of Big Bend we did get to cross the Rio Grande, via rowboat, and visit a little Mexican village, Boquillas, where we had a nice lunch and Gail rode a donkey for the first time.
Christmas was spent in Von Ormy, TX, in a little park outside of town. Not much there but did have some great hiking trails along a river bottom. We shared potluck supper with fellow RV’ers.
New Year’s Eve in San Antonio won the ‘Noisiest New Year’s Eve EVER’ award. Between the fireworks and the gunfire, it sounded like we were in the middle of a battlefield. But, there was a nice sunset. We spent December 31st touring the Alamo site.
Now we headed straight to the coast, to Port Aransas, a small town southeast of Corpus Christi, that is being rebuilt after being severely damaged by Hurricane Harvey in August, 2017. We stayed at a nice park aptly name ‘On The Beach’ where we were just steps away from a lovely beach. Our home is the first RV you see in the picture, which was taken from the beach.
Sandcastle building was sometimes intricate and sometimes just pails of sand dumped on top of each other.
We also found that bird watching is a big deal on the Gulf Coast, and there were probably a dozen birding sites in the small area of Port Aransas. And so we got the bug:
More to follow!
