The next morning, we got up and finished filling out our registration paperwork since the office was closed when we arrived and the attendant recommended the café next door, said that they had great bacon and even better avocado toast. So we walked over and sure enough, though harried, the waitress brought us a great breakfast with pancakes as big around as a dinner plate and seriously ¾” thick! We made friends with a local and had a great chat. Once we left the café, we got in the truck and started to explore!
I was happy to be wearing shorts for the first time in 2022, the sun felt great. We took off toward Presidio, a town on the border with Mexico. We drove through La Jitas, which ironically, is purported to have had a series of beer drinking goats as the Mayor. We found blue bonnets on the roadside, and I hopped out to snap a few. I was pleasantly surprised to find the roadside blue bonnets were covered in honey bees. I had a few curious bees check me out, but were not aggressive.
We continued on through the Big Bend Ranch State Park. We saw a cool roadside area of concrete tipis next to the Rio Grande. We pulled over to check it out and from the river saw a group of people kayaking down the river. Snapped a few pics and we were back on the road.
We are big supporters of state and national parks, so when we pulled into the Hoodoos area, we were a little big surprised to find three state park officers enforcing a park pass purchase. It was only $5 per person, and we were happy to pay it, however, we never saw any notice that we were in a pay use area or a permit purchasing area. So we bought the permit and had a nice chat with Officer Gillespie about the area.
As we continued on, we saw a roadside pull off that had nearly 200 boxes of honeybees, roughly 100 hives on it. Several of the boxes were knocked over, and we wondered if that was done by weather, animal or human. While we had been driving with the windows down, we closed the truck up to check out the bee hives since the area can be prone to africanized bees. We had a few buzz the windows of the truck.
We drove on through winding roads, with Mexico and the river just to our left – sometimes right next to us, others hundreds of yards off. I looked at the map for an aerial and saw that there was lush farm land on the Mexican side of the border. It was cut into narrow strips, in gradient shades of green, showing that they were strip irrigating the land. It was a stark contrast between the desolate area on the other side of the truck. Water is life, and if you ever needed proof of that, you can easily see it on the border, in many, many ways.
Once we reached Presidio, a much more populated town, it was like stepping back in time. We found a farmer’s market and a car show, filled with Hispanic people cooking in the open air and showing off their wares. We saw gas prices at the “fancy” stations nearing $5/gallon and found a small station that looked closed but the pumps were still open and filled up for less than $4/gallon. We drove on and needed a cool drink, so we went to the fancy station and it was like stepping across the border. I was the only anglo in the building and possibly the only native English speaker, as Spanish was flying back and forth between patrons. They had a table of local goodies, though unlabled, and I saw something that looked like a pecan praline, a treat Ray loves. So I got two large bottles of water and a “praline” and headed back to the truck. I gave Ray the praline and he took a bite… I SHOULD have paid attention to the look on his face when he ate it but I did not. So I took a bite and to my horror it was NOT a brown sugar praline. Slightly cinnamon-ish but there was a flavor I could not identify and did not like! I spit it out while Ray was laughing. He said, “I knew you wouldn’t like that!” I still don’t know what it was but it was not the sweet treat I had hoped it to be!!
We checked out the map and thought about heading towards Marfa and Alpine, but did not have the time due to our class meeting at 4:30, so we turned around and headed back. It actually turned out nice, because the contrast between the two sides of the road made it interesting to see a different view for each of us on the way back.
We had seen an interesting old crumbling church and an obviously historic cemetary near Redford, and I asked Ray to pull off the highway so I could grab a couple of shots of the church and cemetery. As I hopped out of the truck, shot a few pics and got back in, Ray says “Did you see those guys?” I looked at him incredulously and looked back at the church to find two Hispanic men peeking out of the crumbling walls of the church. I was a little bit frusterated with myself because I hadn’t seen them before I jumped out of the truck. Personal safety is something I’m usually hyperaware of, and preach to my girlfriends about all the time. I realized that my trust factor with Ray had allowed me to let my guard down. When you are exploring the wilder parts of our country, it doesn’t take much to get yourself in a precarious position and I’ve really tried to get better at being situationally aware.
We moved on to the cemetery, a weird personal love of mine. Its very interesting to me to see how different areas and cultures treat their deceased loved ones. Here we found a mix of old and new, but nearly all were covered with mounds of dark colored rocks. Almost all had crosses, most were wooden and handmade. Few had markers with names and words. There were many with silk memorial flowers and tributes that weather and time had scattered over the area, and pieces had blown all over the area. In contrast, the only signage was a handpainted “No Trash” sign at the entrance of the cemetery, in contrast to the amount of detritus that had been blown all over the area. We decided that once we got back to civilization, we would look up the history of the cemetery and the town, and we found a heartbreaking story of a boy who lost his life tragically due to four US Marines, Esequiel Hernandez, Jr. You can read it here.
There’s also a documentary narrated by Tommy Lee Jones,
We were hungry and decided to stop in at La Jitas Golf Course Village for lunch. Ray got a great burger and I had a bowl that included rice, beans, fajita steak and pico, with house-made flour tortillas. We washed it down with a cold beer. We sat on a beautiful patio, made of the La Jitas, which translates to ‘small flat rocks’ surrounded by palms and green grass.
We made it back to the big bend Adventure Resort and decided that it would be a great time for a quick nap for our night long photo shoot. We had just laid down for 30 minutes when the power went out. It was almost time for the class to meet so we just grabbed our gear and walked to the meeting place, where we found that the power was out not only in our campground, not only the town, but the entire 100 mile region! At 92 degrees, after the meet and greet, we decided it was too hot to stick around there and got back in the truck to explore. We took the road into the National park and what a contrast! We explored the Chisos Mountains and traveled through desert, grassland, tree forest and mountain areas. We made it all the way to the National Park Lodge, where there were lights on! We decided that it would be smart to buy water and snacks, thinking that they must be running of generator power. I grabbed an arm load of bottled cold water, snacks and a 5 hour energy drink and made my way to the cashier to find out that power had been restored and was likely back on in Terlingua. So we drove back to town, and sure enough, the power was on! We stopped at the Cottonwood Grocery store and got coffee creamer and a frozen pizza, headed back to the camper and ate dinner, took a power nap and got ready to go shoot!
