Current location:Terlingua Abajo campsite, Big Bend National Park, TX (yup, a bunch of entries from alongside the Rio Grande under a truly dark sky).
Yup, it’s a big ass state. Their overpasses are large. Their speed limits are almost ridiculously high. And they freaking love their state flag. We entered at the NE corner of the state and the I-20 mile marker read 650 (or something close to that). Damn that’s a lot of miles to get across a state. We later noticed on the atlas that I-10 further south starts at 835! We spent a little while on interstates but because we were cutting diagonal down to San Antonio we ended up on a lot of state highways. We saw quite a lot of farm land and surprisingly treed rolling hills. We hadn’t realized how diverse the state is, particularly on the LA border/east side. The highway was a 2 lane road, very little shoulder and questionable pavement practices but for some reason the state has no problem saying “yup, crank away at 75 mph”. Hobbes was pretty happy at 70. Better yet, Lara and I were happy at 70. We shot for and ended up at Davey Crocket National Forest. After a pretty lengthy chat with Chatty McParkRanger at the visitor center (we were probably the only people she saw all day) we headed out to “dispersed camping” one of of the small forest service roads. We decided we should start taking free accommodations when they arrive, even if their is a campground with electricity and bathrooms nearby. The 45 minutes of verbal excitement from the park ranger we talked too was useful and informative because we learned about an endangered woodpecker they were bringing back to the park with homemade “inserts”/bird houses they cut out and inserted into certain trees. These trees were located right near our site for the night. We unfortunately didn’t get to see any of the birds but that didn’t stop us from making the kissing sounds/calling they had taught us back at the visitor center. The night was quite in the pine forest and the birds were our alarm clock in the morning.
The next day we continued SW with a stop in Austin for lunch and to check out the graffiti park. Onwards we ended up in San Antonio to visit an old work friends of mine, Aaron. Before he was able to get off of work (I wasn’t even sure what “work” meant anymore) we did the touristy stop at the Alamo to get our history lesson for the day and walked the River Walk with Rooney. We were then shown some locals highlights with some legit, authentic Mexican food and stops at some unique San Antonio watering holes. It was another great visit with old friends, reassuring us we have a great group of people scattered around the country.
The following day we pointed ourselves onto some more backroads of Texas to see where we ended up. US-90 was more of the Texas we expected. Remote, ranches, open land. We could either drive a good amount to Big Bend National Park (6+ hours) or stop early at Amistad National Recreation Area (2-3 hours). We only got in the morning part of the drive and decided instead to see if any local mechanics had time to install our new drive shaft that has been sitting in our van for two weeks. Three stops, some picking of mechanic’s brains and a few YouTube videos and we decide, “ahh screw it, we can do this”. We pulled into a quiet parking lot along side the Amistad Reservoir and got to work. It was only after about an hour did we get a visit from your friendly, local border patrol agent. He was really just seeing if we were all good and was really nice about it and loved petting Rooney. We didn’t mention that we were all of about 3/4 of a mile from the border so the van probably drew some attention. Well it took us about 60 minutes to realize we just didn’t have the right tools and went back into town. We did learn valuable things during our first hour so we actually did the install rather quickly in the Napa Parts parking lot in Del Rio, Texas. This foray into 4x4 mechanics solidified that we would stay at the reservoir that night and we headed to a little part of the National Recreation Area for a quiet night off of Spur 406.
We will continue some more of Texas in the next post because we are now on our way to Big Bend National Park which I’m sure will be a whole ‘nother aspect of this state.