Chisos Mountains, Big Bend National Park

These are the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park in Texas. The photo was taken from our backcountry campsite near the Paint Gap Hills. We had spent the day kayaking the Rio Grande in the southwest corner of the park and in the evening had driven back to this location where we stayed the night at what was little more than a gravel turnoff along a dirt road.

We've been away from home now for nearly two weeks and will not be home again for another week. We left Monday, the 10th, and drove through Idaho and Montana to Sheridan, Wyoming, found a place to park our van and slept the night. It was 2 degrees F (-17C) in the morning and we had high winds, blowing snow, and slippery bridges as we drove through Wyoming and Colorado.

The check engine light had come on during the day (it proved later to be bad gas) and instead of staying the night in Amarillo, Texas, as we planned, we drove on through the night to San Antonio where we found a dealer and had the car checked out. That drive brought us to 75F (24C) temperatures in San Antonio where we checked into our guest house.

We spent two wonderful days in San Antonio, walking the riverwalk and biking the mission trail, as well as enjoying the wonderful guesthouse, a historic house on the river, that some of our children had booked for us. We enjoyed the city especially because we had not been there since 1996, when we flew to Houston with friends and drove there.

Leaving San Antonio we drove southwest to Big Bend National Park where we spent the next five days, hiking, kayaking and exploring. When I have opportunity to post more photos from that trip I'll describe our time there in more detail. We left there yesterday and drove to Carlsbad Caverns and spent the rest of a cold, miserable day touring the caverns.

We are leaving shortly for Guadalupe Mountains National Park and hope to spend today and tomorrow hiking and exploring there. The weather report, which were rather grim for that area have improved dramatically, and so we have, more or less. kept to our original plans which include camping there tonight and possibly tomorrow, spending a quiet Sunday in Carlsbad and then going on to Grand Canyon.

Since we need to get going, I'll catch up on commenting over the weekend.