On the Road Again

April 22, 2013

We packed up the van, said our goodbyes to Sarah, Jeff and Mariann, and got back on the road around noon on Monday. A great, relaxing family visit… Thanks for everything, y’all!

We had an easy drive, heading west and south, down to the Rio Grande. This is our second drive almost all the way across Texas in the last week—still amazing to watch the terrain change so much. The Houston area is very green and lush, but it didn’t take long for us to get into dry, scrub country, complete with plenty of cactus, mostly prickly pear, which is edible and is the “official plant symbol of Texas.” The highway we’re on (US 90) crosses over numerous colorfully named rivers and creeks…but where’s the water?? No water, just large dry washes. The flooding must be spectacular.

We are breaking up the long drive to Big Bend National Park into two days, and our goal for the first day is Del Rio, a small city (35,000) on the Rio Grande, just across the Mexican border from Ciudad Acuña, and there’s a big bridge connecting the two cities. We arrive in Del Rio around 6:30 pm and pull into the Buzzard Roost Saloon and RV Campground. 

It’s a low-budget place (surprised?), apparently filled with elderly “snowbirds” living in their RVs. They have room for overnight campers though and we have a quiet (and relatively cheap) night. It’s warm in the van early in the evening but our Fan-tastic Fan cools it down quickly after the sun goes down. We start out sleeping with nothing over us, not even a sheet, but end up in the middle of the night pulling two blankets over us. Our RV air conditioner is broken and not easily fixed or replaced, so we decided to see how it goes without it on this trip. The Fan-tastic Fan in the roof pulls a strong breeze through the van, so as long as there’s any coolness in the outside air, it works fine. (The broken air conditioner is the RV unit over our sleeping area, not the “car” air conditioner, which works fine, fortunately, as we do have quite a bit of desert to drive through.)

After a stop at the local WalMart to stock up on a few things, we’ll be heading into the wilderness of Big Bend. My goal is to see a male painted bunting. Since I was a little girl studying animal and bird pictures in our World Book Encyclopedia, I’ve always wanted to catch a glimpse of this rainbow-colored bird. It looks like a palette of every color was splashed on it.

 Big Bend is the bird mecca of the United States, and painted buntings are supposed to be fairly common, so my hopes are high. There’s also a warbler—the Colima warbler—that is only found in the mountains in Big Bend, so I’d like to add that rare bird to my birding lifelist as well.

Where we are: