Exploring the Mission in Goliad

A quick trip over to the mission in Goliad State Park!  A stop on the way at the Cracked Crab for a seafood lunch. It was a quick getaway to get out of the house!

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Turkey Day in Big Bend

500+ miles from our house to Big Bend!  A 4:30 am start put us there in plenty of time to find our rental......Big Bend Observatory!

A rustic cabin, a star gazing platform, and a fancy telescope inside a building with a retractable roof!  Plus a resident metal eagle! Heading into the National Park in the morning to explore and use my new camera!

Big Bend or Bust today!  Entered the park, and took Old Maverick Road, 12.6 miles of scenic washboard according to my hubby!  But, it offered lots of opportunities for photography.  

We stopped for a picnic lunch at Santa Elena Canyon and shared a table with a couple from Santa Fe, NM. Skipped hiking the canyon because of my shoulder injury and my PT urging me not to fall and completely tear it, but walked along the Rio Grande to take photos!  

Then we were off to Castolon and a cold ice cream treat at the store.  We stopped for some short hikes and explored some old homesteads.  Our final hike was at Lower Burro Mesa Pour-off Trail. Back at our cabin we had dinner on the porch as the sun set behind the horizon!

Very hazy in the park today! Hoping for clearer skies tomorrow!

Still learning with my new camera!  One thing for sure it is much heavier to pack than anything I have ever used!  The learning curve may take a little longer...might even need read the book!  Or maybe just take a bunch of photos...bound to occasionally get a good one!

Thanksgiving Day was spent enjoying the beauty of Big Bend!  Lunch was simple, but delicious....baked ham, sweet potatoes, and corn!   Late in the afternoon we drove into Terlingua and walked the grounds of the old church and cemetery.  

If only the dead could talk, to tell us what life was like many years ago in this rugged, remote part of Texas.  We can’t even conceive how difficult it was. We got back to our cabin just in time to catch a brilliant display at sunset!  Wow it was spectacular!

Back to Big Bend National Park after breakfast and coffee on the porch.  Drove the Grapevine Hills Road to the trail of Balanced Rock.  Hiked part of the trail and took photos, but skipped the last part of the trail that required scrambling over boulders!  Not a great idea with my shoulder! 

Then a quick stop at Dugout Wells and on to Boquillas Canyon Overlook were we ran into folks from Victoria.  Lunch was a picnic at Rio Grande Village, parking under the shade of a big, old Cottonwood tree and opening the tailgate for our picnic.  Heading back we decided to go up into the Basin, but heard there might be traffic delays for road construction, saw the traffic stopped and vetoed that idea. So back to our cabin to grab a nap before sunset and dinner! Didn’t take as many pictures today, but we were on the road driving a bunch!

 

On the road again, we drove from Terlingua to Presidio, then on to the end of the paved road on FM 170 passing thru Indio, Ruidosa, and ending our trek in Candelaria.  Round trip we drove 230 miles!

    Indio were cotton was once king is now only represented by a cemetery high on a hill! 

    Ruidosa was a former penal colony occupied by convicts and now sits abandoned. Nearby lie the adobe ruins of El Corazón Sagrado de la Iglesia de Jesús, the Ruidosa community church built in the early 1900s.

    Candelaria was a ranching settlement where time seems to have stood still, and children still play in the street and clothes are hung on the line to dry. Along this same road are hundreds and hundreds of bee hives that a Colorado company uses to winter their bees in a warmer climate! 

    The drive was like a step back in time, reading the epitaphs of long lost souls.  The cemeteries were home to veterans from WWII and Korea, to cowboys and ranch hands, to young children lost to soon and hundreds of unmarked graves of unknown loved ones.

 

Our final day called for one more trip into the park and a drive up into the basin. With most of the crowds gone, and construction halted it was a easy drive.  It was about 50 degrees with a brisk cold wind, but the abundant sunshine helped! 

I tried to get a few more photos before we head home!  Last stop was Terlingua for a photo of the Starlight Cafe, without the masses of folks that hang around in the evening. Up early and headed home in the