From Big Bend to the Pecos River

Sunday, April 3, 2011 - Yesterday evening about 7:30 we made our last scenic drive in Big Bend National Park, down to the Boquillas Canyon.  The village of Boquillas is right across the river, and the Mexicans bring their native wares over here to try to sell them.  Since it is illegal for them to cross the river, they apparently just leave them and hope for the buyers to leave the money for them.  Since it is also illegal to buy anything from them, I don't imagine they get much business.

You can see the village from our viewpoint, and the brochures say that sometimes a Mexican serenades the American visitors from a sandbar in the river.  We didn't see anyone when we were here.

We slept much better last night, with air conditioning again, even though this campground is not much more than a parking lot.  But it had electricity!

But a roadrunner came by this morning.

And 3 coyotes also came by.

We got an early start today, finally, and were on the road at 8:25.  Every time we met an RV heading down to Big Bend, Joe yelled, "hot, hot, don't you know it's hot."  We saw some Border Patrol activity before we got outside the park, but don't know what was going on.

We are headed toward Del Rio, but the campground we have picked out is about 40 miles before that.  We checked the weather for Del Rio today, and it is forecast 93 degrees, with 78% humidity.  Oh, yeah.

We finally got out of the park and headed East.  We got to Langtry about 12:30 and toured Judge Roy Bean's place, which has a Visitor's Center in front of it.  Judge Bean, also known as the Hanging Judge, made this place famous during the years when the railroad was being built through here.

The saloon burned down once, and when he rebuilt, he also built a separate building as his residence, which he called the Opera House, trying to get Jersey Lilly Langtry to come perform in Langtry, the town he had named after her.

They also had a very nice cactus garden here.

We ate a quick lunch in the RV here, then headed on down the road.  We crossed the Pecos River and camped at the Seminole Canyon State Historical Park, which is only about 1 mile passed the river.  This picture is from the bridge on Highway 90.  The river is a very pretty green color, I haven't learned yet where the color comes from.

This campground is just right off the road, very deserty (not a tree in sight), and it is 96 today. They have guided tours of hikes through the canyon, but we'll skip that.

After dinner, we drove down to the River at one of the Armistad Recreational Area boat ramps.

The water felt pretty good, we probably should have jumped in since we are hating this heat.

On our way back into camp, we came up on 4 turkeys, apparently out looking for dinner.

We also saw two bunnies beside the road.  And we came upon this oven used to feed the railroad workers.

We have electricity at this campground, so we are looking forward to sleeping cool again.  We won't be staying anyplace without electricity from now on, unless this weather cools back off.  Joe was reading about some caves up by San Antonio, and one stays a constant 72 degrees.  Joe said we are going to go find it and just sit inside it all day.  We thought we would have this campground to ourselves, but a group of bicyclists came in (Coast to Coast, I think is the group name).  Their coordinator (or whatever) came through in a Penske truck and drop off gear at about 15 sites.  Then as it got closer to 5:00 p.m., several other RVs pulled in, so I'm guessing this park is nearly full.