January 14
Today’s adventure was at Big Bend National Park. This is a beautiful park in southwest Texas on the Mexican border about 100 miles south of Texas Rt. 90. It took about 2 hours to get there from where we spent the night in Alpine. The Park is huge, with over 100 miles of paved roads and many more miles of improved and primitive dirt roads. Even though we were told that our Honda CRV should be fine on the dirt roads, we decided to stick to the paved roads.
First, we did the 30-mile Ross Maxell Scenic Drive stopping at many scenic overlooks. At the end of the paved portion of the drive was the Santa Elena Canyon where we took a short walk to the Rio Grande. The river was narrower than we thought and while we were easily able to walk down to it, the Mexican side was at the base of gigantic canyon walls. It was really beautiful. Since we didn’t want
to drive on the unpaved roads to do the loop drive, we turned around and went back the way we came. Even though it was the same road, the view from the opposite direction was quite different so it was almost like a different drive.
Once we got back to where we started at the Panther Junction Visitor Center, we drove in the other direction to Rio Grande Village. This is a 20-mile drive and while not nearly as beautiful as the Ross Maxell drive, the view of the Boquillas Canyon made the drive worthwhile. We thought about taking a side drive to the Historic Hot Springs, but the road was one of the primitive dirt roads so after only about a mile we turned around and went back to the main road.
We spent about 6 hours in the park, most of it in the car but we’re so glad we made the trek. It pretty far off the beaten path so you’ll need to make an effort to get there but its’ definitely worth the trip.
We planned to spend the night in Sanderson Tx before heading to San Antonio tomorrow but when we got there, we found the one motel was quite rundown. So, we decided to keep driving the 120 miles to Del Rio, which is a good-sized town. Since Sanderson also didn’t have a restaurant, we ate Fritos and Swedish Fish to tide us over until we could get dinner. Not very healthy but it was better than nothing. Ah….the joys of traveling through West Texas.
The upside of driving so far today is that we’re only about 2 1/2 away from San Antonio so we’ll have much less time in the car tomorrow. We’re certainly looking forward to it. Talk with you soon.