day 9 - dallas, tx to big bend national park, tx

Early in the morning, we set out from Dallas to do the 10-hour drive to Big Bend National Park.

The scenery change on this part of the drive was spectacular. Views from the car went from this...

...to this...


...to this.



A side note: as we drove on through the Bible belt, an increasing proportion of the roadside billboards that we saw turned out to be messages from God, undoubtedly sponsored by local churches. Most of the time they were unexpected and I missed photographing them, but here's one of the milder examples.

More extreme examples were messages like, "HELL IS REAL" in large, fiery red letters.

We stopped in the city of Midland for lunch. It had been a while, and we were aching for some simple, trashy, Chinese buffet. Taste of China delivered on that count, but otherwise, Midland sucked. Here's a snapshot of so-called "downtown" Midland:

We passed some oil rigs on our way down south, busily pumping away. Around here, the air started to smell like oil as well.


Finally, the land started to turn desertlike and scrubby. Large trees all but disappeared, and the landscape became dominated by pale tufts of grass, low shrubs, and cacti.

It soon became obvious that we were in the middle of nowhere. Our iPhone gave out on us, both in terms of Internet and cellular signals. We drove on fenceless, street lamp-less roads with 75 mph limits while miles of ranchland flew by. Occasionally, we saw these old-school windmills, which Roy said powered pumps for watering cows. The somewhat shoddy buildings were also a good clue that there wasn't too much around.




Finally, we reached this sign!!!


...But it was still 20 miles to the visitor's center. However, we were immediately rewarded with the sight of a lizard on the road.

We also saw some freaky plants like this one! This is the century plant, which is used for making tequila.

After registration - and finding out that by chance, we had come to the park on no fee weekend - we started the 26-mile drive to our campground, which was in a basin within a ring of mountains.

The scenery was just unbelievable. These pictures do not do any justice to the experience of being in this tiny car on this eternally winding road, surrounding by the rising peaks of million-year old mountains.





We got to our campground and set up our tent. Afterwards, we still had some hours of daylight left, so we went off to do the Basin Loop Trail, a 1.75 mile trail around a mountain, which was, by the way, covered in "Beware of Bears" and "Recent Mountain Lion Sighting" signs. We did not see these two animals but we did get to chase some roadrunners down the street (until they cheated and actually flew on top of a rock).

The following are scenes from our little hike. We managed to catch the sunset coming back, and got some great views through a rock formation called the "Window", a V-shaped hole in the mountains.

Prickly pear cacti, which are everywhere in the park

Finally, we got back to camp and cooked dinner: burgers, sauteed mushrooms and onions, corn and s'mores. While cleaning up after dinner, we got a nighttime visitor: a skunk! He was pretty
benign though - just kind of walked through our camp, looked around, and trotted off.

Then we got a nice night's sleep to prepare for our day of exploration tomorrow. Yay! We love Big Bend.