Hello again from west Texas, USA. This blog I will report on 3 stops and nearly catch up to where we are, Big Bend National Park. But it will depend on the Wi-Fi as we are so remote here that we haven’t had any (AT&T) phone reception for a week. More on that later.
After a terrific stay at Brownsville we chuffed off north along the Mexico/USA border to Laredo. It was interesting on the way to see Border Patrol blimps aloft checking for any illegal crossings of the Rio Grande. Just to clear things up the border is the Rio Grande also known as the Rio Bravo. If you’ve been following the blog lately you will have seen our reports on the fantastic rest stops/Tourist Information Centres that they have here in the USA. Well our first stop in Laredo was one of these. This TIC was a magnificent complex done in Mexican Hacienda style. If they ever close it down I could easily snap it up as a luxury residence. The ten photos after the blimp are all of the TIC and you’ll see it has a pond, pergolas, fountains and more all tiled in beautiful bright mosaic tiles. A fantastic place to take a break from driving to refresh (Australian highway authorities take note).
Well, we got to our RV Park and at first thought it was a joke. However “Vaquero Village RV Park” is it’s name due to the mock up old town that sits at the front of the park. It is NOT as we initially thought representative of the RV Park as a whole (but not far from it). Next day we headed into Laredo city and found ourselves at a ‘brand name’ mall and after a bit of a wander we noticed a sign pointing us to Mexico. “Why not” we thought? We had our passports on us. So we followed the sign and in a few minutes we were over the border in the Mexican township of Nuevo Laredo. No visas required just our passports to get us back to the USA. The pics right up to the shot of the Statue are all the Mexican town. Back in the USA after some shopping and we walked a bit of Laredo until we tired and returned back to our van. That was it for Laredo. Not really a town of excitement.
Moving on we kept following the border to Del Rio. This we thought was going to be as exciting as Laredo but thankfully we were wrong as Del Rio has some beautiful scenery, not the least of which is the sunset over the Mexican mountains, Lake Amistad (an artificial lake made by damming part of the Rio Grande) and an incredible tourist site in the Seminole Canyon State Park and Historic Site. This made up for the lousy RV park where we were just shoved into a site right against the highway that ran trucks 24/7. But I won’t dwell on the other faults of this hole. Just enjoy the pictures of the lake and the infrastructure within it. Campsites, shelters, toilets, boat ramps, fishing jetties make this a terrific holiday place.
The hole I will talk about is Seminole Canyon State Park and Historic Site. Wow, what a hole. The canyon is in Val Verde County, west of Comstock, contains 2,172.5 acres. The state purchased the park lands from private owners in 1973 to 1977. The park opened in February 1980. (https://tpwd.texas.gov/state-parks/seminole-canyon) Once we’d looked inside the Ranger Station at the exhibits there we met with 2 guides who would take us down into a magnificent canyon to see not just the environment and vegetation but also a stunning gallery of native Indian Pictographs and Petroglyphs (rock art and rock carvings) up to several thousand years old. Carved out over millennia by raging torrents the Indians here (mostly Comanche) left tales and instructions for future generations. While not quite as old as Australia’s Kakadu galleries these were brilliant just the same. Early man first visited this area 12,000 years ago, when now-extinct species of elephant, camel, bison and horse roamed the plains. By 7,000 years ago, the climate had changed and the landscape looked much like it does today. Despite the struggle for survival, some of these prehistoric people found the creative energy to paint pictographs in Fate Bell and other rock shelters. More than 200 pictograph sites hold examples of their style of rock paintings.
I have also thrown in some photos of the vegetation with this gallery but note that in the next few galleries I intend to post an entire gallery just of the wild flowers and vegetation.
After an exhilarating visit to Seminole Canyon we had to keep moving so this time we were headed to the town of Marathon, Gateway to the Big Bend National Park. There were lots of long straight stretches through the Chihuahua Desert yet we still found some people on bicycles out in the heat like mad dogs and Englishmen as the saying goes. I am not sure of the geology of this area at all but I suspect that it is all part of an elevated plain randomly and often bisected by deep canyons that seem to just appear out of nowhere. We passed many crumbling ruins and old roads and railway bridges. Eventually we made it to our lunch stop at the small town of Langtry.
Now Langtry might be small but it makes up for this with a great history and colourful tales. Langtry is the town where “The Hanging Judge”, Judge Roy Bean made his legend (and myths) back in the days when the west was young and lawless. The Judge Roy Bean Centre is now another of those fantastic rest stop/TIC’s that I mentioned above in Laredo. Using the Judge’s original Hotel and residence they have expanded to incorporate a native cactus garden of several acres and an inter-active history museum that makes this another ‘must stop’ place of interest.
You may notice two photos I have included that display details of a prize fight. Well this is a terrific example of Bean’s activities. To stay on the right side of the law (something Bean rarely did as he believed HE was the law) when a lucrative chance to hold this world title prize fight arose Bean had to find a way to hold this illegal (under Federal Law) activity. So what he did was to take the fight down to a nearby canyon where in the middle of the Rio Bravo (Grande) there was an island. He had a bridge built across the river to the island and held the fight there. How did this make the fight legal? Well as I said earlier, The Rio Grande IS the border and neither the USA or Mexico claimed this island so Bean argued he was on neutral territory. The fight went on (for just 95 seconds – See Mundine isn’t the only challenger to fall quickly) and Judge Roy Bean made a killing.
Now, we left the TIC to have lunch and so we drove down one of the only 3 or 4 streets in Langtry and found a lovely spot on the side of the road right next to a Canyon. Wouldn’t you know it, we took a walk and found that this is where that prize fight happened! Down to the Canyon (sadly we couldn’t get there with the RV hooked up) over the bridge and there sits the island.
Back in the car after lunch we continued towards Marathon when we passed by a store that happened to have dinosaurs for sale (and elephants and other critters) out in the middle of nowhere. By 3pm we got to the Marathon Motel and RV Park and as we parked we both noticed what appeared to be a mini-observatory inside the RV Park. Sure enough that’s exactly what it was and by a stroke of good fortune we managed to arrive to join in with the free “Star Party” each night during March. Following our poor choice of RV Parks in our two previous stops at least this park has an owner who like to take care of his park. The entire Motel & Park was built in Adobe style including a most beautiful courtyard garden with fountain, fireplace and outdoor eating gear all for customer use. I put in a photo of the handbasin in the toilet too. It is rustic style but if you zoom in on that basin the colour and design is magnificent Mexican décor.
As seems to be the norm out here glorious sunsets are common but set as it is in a basin in the desert our surrounds here were splendid. Next day we took a short drive to an old Cavalry outpost that was established from Marathon at a waterhole. The spring here was valuable to the community but was subject to intermittent Comanche raids so the US Army set up “Camp Post”. The drive was made particularly interesting by the wildlife we encountered on the trip. Several deer, a vulture and even a peccary or Javelina (related to the wild pig) made an appearance for us.
I’ll finish up this long post with a few photos of Marathon. Next stop is Terlingua, a small town nestled between Big Bend National Park and Big Bend ranch State Park. All I will say now is do NOT miss the next blog. We have totally run out of adjectives for this sublimely ridiculously gorgeous country. But you’ll have to wait for that.
Cheers for now.
Garry and Shane