A Birthday In Big Bend

Before leaving Seminole Canyon, we took a guided tour to view to the 4,000 year old pictographs and to learn a little about the life of the earliest hunter/gatherers in the area. The girls have both been practising their spear-throwing ever since – you never know when it may come in handy!

In the afternoon, on yet another glorious sunny day, we drove across the increasingly mountainous Chihuahuan Desert alongside the transcontinental railway to Marathon, our staging-post for the Big Bend National Park. We camped in a great little RV park by the tracks and can confirm that Amtrack has frequent overnight schedules! Awoken by the 7am express, we sought out a bakery and found a cafe that sold us a whole pumpkin cake, and two chocolate bars (improvised icing) for Liberty’s 5th birthday.

The Big Bend National Park was a fantastic mix of desert, mountain, river and abundant wildlife. We spent 5 days hiking the trails and testing the girls’ endurance. They held up well overall, but today they begged to go on a long drive so that they could just sit and watch a movie.

Liberty spent her birthday attending a ranger-led walk/talk about mountain lions, complete with horror stories such as “this is the spot where the 5 year old child was pounced upon...” all to be re-enacted, ad infinitum, taking turns to be the lion – this is where that spear-throwing practise comes in.

After a lunchtime cake ceremony we took a longer walk where Liberty’s biggest treat was to see 3 Mexican black bears, one much too close for comfort – just 10 yds away – too close even for Tony to take photos. We were glad to note that Liberty had been listening to the talk in the morning as she advised us not to bend down or we would look like a deer and it might pounce! Right attitude, wrong animal, but we weren’t taking any chances just the same. As it turned out we left without Big Bend without major incident, although there was the tragic loss of Francesca’s soft toy...

Today we are in Alpine having seen a little more of the real Texas, including delicious breakfast burritos, ghost towns and the local attire of cowboy hats and pocketed handguns.

Texas

We’ve now hit the Wild West we had hoped for....we are writing this from Seminole Canyon State Park, in southern Texas, within sight of the Mexico border. When we arrived last night we had intended a brief stopover en route to Big Bend, but the vast, quiet desert and wonderful weather has seduced us all. In fact we gave the girls the choice of what to do this morning and they opted for a long walk to the Rio Grande and another night here – including a campfire and toasted marshmallows.

Following on from the last excerpt, having enjoyed the pool at Luling so much...

... we moved on to New Braunfels and Gruene, Germanic hill towns on the Guadalupe River.  We stayed a couple of nights by the river where the girls enjoyed more time in the water.

On Sunday, we had a great day out in San Antonio - appreciating why The Alamo is so important to Texans, enjoying the Riverside Walk through the town centre and taking a rare break from sandwiches to lunch in a tapas bar by the river.

Mosquito Misery

Heading west from New Orleans, we waited out the tail end of Hurricane Ida in Creole country and then took the coastal route to Galveston (oh Galveston). We had promised the girls a spot of alligator hunting and then couple of days on the beach, and we were all looking forward to swimming and sandcastles on the Gulf Coast.

The alligator hunt was a big success and the bayous of Louisiana and Eastern Texas were surprisingly interesting – endless reedy marshes punctuated by gnarled oaks draped in Spanish moss; lots of wildlife; little fishing communities built on stilts and sand; and a plentiful supply of oysters and shrimp.

As you can see, there aren’t many photos of us – we were prisoners in the van...the mosquitoes here seemed hungrier and more numerous than those in Labrador. We drove ever further around the coast hoping to escape the pests, but even the beaches were infested. Eventually, at Galveston we found some respite and optimistically told the girls that we would stay two nights at Surfside Beach – a little town just off the end of Galveston Island which, after some uncharacteristic research, seemed ideal - http://www.texasexplorer.com/Surfside.htm.

We had anticipated a genteel holiday village, an RV park a block from the beach and some lazy time enjoying the sea and sand. It was not to be....Apart from the millions of Deet-resistant mosquitoes, most of the beach had been washed away by Hurricane Ike a year ago and many of the houses were strewn, as rubble, along the shoreline. The tourist brochures had neglected to mention these small details, nor the adjacent oil refinery!!

Unfortunately for us, the high tides of this week had swamped the village, leaving the RV park a quagmire and sweeping away another house. We left the next day and headed inland towards San Antonio. Thankfully, yesterday we found a campsite at the other end of the spectrum – a pool, llamas, goats and a pond with a pedallo alleviated some of the girls’ disappointment at the foreshortened beach time. We are now in Texan Hill Country camping by the Guadalupe River, still scratching!

New Orleans

In a frenzy of blogging, or rather just having Internet access two nights in a row...we thought we would put up a few pictures of our fabulous visit to New Orleans...

We took a trip on the steamboat Natchez - Francesca saw little of the view as she has become an overnight bookworm - she even fell up some steps trying to read Enid Blyton in the street!  Little B found the steam whistle somewhat overpowering, the gumbo too spicy and the street performers hilarious.  We all loved the jazz band accompanying a passing wedding procession, but Libs thought that the guests were all waving white hankies to surrender and save the bride - too many battlefield tours probably.