Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas

Overnight stops (in date order): Pensacola West; New Orleans (x2); Lafayette; Houston; San Antonio (x3); Fredericksburg (x2); Seminole Canyon State Park (x2); Stillwell Store; Big Bend National Park (x2); Presidio; Van Horn

We continued west on Interstate 10; through the narrow coastal strips of Alabama and Mississippi.

We stopped for two nights at an inner-city RV park in New Orleans – complete with search lights, razor wire-topped fence and a guard dog.

Between torrential showers,

we visited the sights of the French quarter,

 

 

 

and ended with early evening jazz.

 

Danielle felt at home in the Acadian Village open-air museum at Lafayette.

The Acadians (or ‘Cajuns’ to the Americans) were French colonists expelled by the British from New France (now parts of Quebec and the maritime provinces of Canada) in the mid-18^th century.  Some settled in Louisiana and intermingled with the local Creole people.

 

 

We crossed another State border into Texas

 

and camped by a lake outside Houston; in the company of a great-tailed grackle

and an equally noisy, but more elusive, downy woodpecker.

The nearby Space Center Houston has a replica space shuttle atop a Boeing 747,

 

 

and in-depth displays about life in space

– it couldn’t have been so easy getting out of that suit if you were in a hurry.

The Saturn V moon rocket (one of three remaining) is the most impressive exhibit.

The first Saturn V was launched 55 years ago.  The statistics are daunting – 60 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, weighing 2,600 tons when fully fuelled (with more than 2 Million litres of kerosene and liquid oxygen) and with an estimated fuel efficiency of 5 inches per gallon.

Changing gear, we spent three nights in San Antonio – famous for the walking path beside the eponymous river.

 

 

 

 

Spring was in the air.

 

 

 

We didn’t forget The Alamo,

nor the Mission San Jose,

nor the San Fernando Cathedral

(which, according to American mythology, houses the remains of Davy Crockett);

All of which were built by the Spanish in the 18^th Century.

Going back further, the Museum of Art has a small but high quality section on pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.

We stopped at a dusty and windy RV Park at Fredericksburg,

 

to spend a day in the town, that was founded by German immigrants in the mid-19^th Century.

 

Once a major producer of peaches, wine is now the main local product.  The two most famous sons of Fredericksburg are Admiral Chester William Nimitz, Fleet Admiral of the United States Navy – and commander of the Pacific Fleet in the second world war, and John Mulkey Owens Jr.

who – presumably in the absence of anything better to do – compiled the world’s largest collection of barbed wire.

West of Fredericksburg, we were deep into southern Texas ranch country.

Settlements were few and far between.

I don’t know whether it really was ‘the best in Texas’, but the jerky (beef, elk, boar and venison) was certainly good.

Two nights at Seminole Canyon State Park

 

gave us the chance to experience the Chihuahuan Desert.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Canyon

opens into the Rio Grande; with Mexico on the other side.

People have lived in the area around Seminole Canyon for thousands of years.  The walls of caves along the Canyon walls are decorated with paintings; some of which are at least as old as the Egyptian Pyramids.

 

 

 

 

We returned to the Rio Grande at Big Bend National Park.

 

Close-up, the river was not looking so Grande – about the width and depth of the Avon at Salisbury;

you could wade across it to join the gauchos in Mexico.

 

Upstream of the Rio Grande, much of the river’s water is diverted for agriculture. Also, it had not rained in the region for two months. 

Otherwise, the Park is magnificent; with wonderful views; west to the Chisos Mountains,

and east to the Sierra del Carmen mountain range in Mexico.

The colours were best at sunset.

 

 

A rocky, three-mile hike down-river from the campground,

 

ends with a soak in the Boquillas Hot Springs.  The water is captured in the foundations of a ruined bathhouse built as part of a spa resort in the early 20^th Century.

There are few signs of those who lived in the area for thousands of years before the Spanish conquest.  In places, there are mortar holes that people cut in the rocks to use for grinding and preparing food.

Although March is the middle of the dry season,

the ocotillos had crimson flowers at their tips

and the first blue bonnets, the Texas State flower, were in bloom.

Here are Danielle’s pictures of the beautiful, dormant little trees along the desert road.

 

 

Most of the desert animals are nocturnal – the exceptions are birds

 

The second is a roadrunner; capable of chasing down and killing a rattlesnake.

After leaving the National Park, we stopped for lunch at Terlingua; a ghost town that was once the site of a mine.

The town is being revived by a mix of bohemians and artists.

After a night at the border town of Presidio, we visited Fort Davis, a frontier military post during the ‘Indian wars’ of the second half of the 19^th Century.

 

 

The fort’s principal role was to defend the road between San Antonio and El Paso from attacks by Apaches and Comanches; whose lands had been taken by American settlers.

We followed the route of the old road, north-east through the Davis Mountains

On the higher ground, we passed through woodland with large trees for the first time in many days.

On our last night in Texas, we ate nopales – the chopped pads of the prickly pear cactus.