After spending the night in downtown Ft. Davis, we hit the only place on in town that served breakfast, according to Google, where I had pretty authentic migas with refried beans. A solid 3 FPWs.
We had one pretty epic hike planned. A seven miler up into the high Chisos Mountains to Laguna Meadow. We woke up early to freezing temps. The leaky ice maker outside our cottage had created a slick spot of ice on the sidewalk. Gramps made the half mile walk from his accommodations to meet us and we headed out. Around 1,600 feet of elevation gain awaited us.
Although it was late November, the leaf change had just gotten going in earnest. The mountains are an interesting mix of desert and forest. Among the cactus and agave are ponderosa pine and oak trees and other plants commonly found farther north in the West. Although we didn’t get to them on this hike, the Chisos Mountains are home to southernmost stand of aspen in the U.S.
A couple hours in we stopped for a longish break for a midmorning snack. Gina, being some kind of bird whisperer, started throwing bits of peanut butter crackers on the ground and small flock of Mexican jays swooped out of the mountains and started chowing down. They nearly ate out of our hands.
We lined up for a group photo after our snack. We should’ve stood closer to the camera.
Gramps recommends climbing trees whenever possible. Especially when you’re 4 miles up a mountain in one of the most remote areas of the country with no real hope of timely medical intervention should you fall and crack open your skull.
We did a lot of lolly gagging so it took us about 4 hours to get to Laguna Meadow. We thought it was pretty funny that there was a weird pit toilet up there. The trail gets a lot of traffic. Many, many groups of hikers passed us on the way up. Most were headed to the South Rim of the Chisos to camp for the night. Some groups planned to make a day trip out of the 13 mile round trip South Rim hike. We saw a man and woman in basically street clothes who said they were doing that. The woman had one of those mesh backpack purse things with the strings for straps with 2 bottles of water in it. I imagine they wanted to kill each other when they got finished.
On the way back, just as the trail started downhill, Gramps broke off and scrambled up the southern peak of Ward Mountain. I soon followed him up there and got what must be the second best view of the Basin.
Views of Casa Grande from Ward Mountain. The top of Casa Grande is the best view of the Basin.
We paused in the howling wind atop the mountain to take a bunch of photos.
Gramps, ala Vanna White, pointing out Emory Peak, the highest point in the Chisos.
Gramps isn’t afraid to do what it takes to get the shot.
One of my favorite things to do in Big Bend NP is to hit the visitor center in the Basin and check out the map of recent bear and mountain lion sightings. It’s hard to make out in the photo, but there were two sightings of a group of three mighty pumas at Laguna Meadow the week before our hike.
The hike took way longer than any of us expected. Gramps thought we’d be back around noon. It was closer to 4 p.m. We were starving and looking forward to eating at the Starlight Theater outside the park in Terlingua Ghost Town. The ghost town is small area of ruins from the area’s mining days with a big gift shop, bed and breakfast accommodations and a few restaurants. It’s always packed with tourists and locals having a big time. The waits are long for the restaurant but there’s enough to do that you don’t really notice.
Day of the Dead items are a big component of the souvenirs at the gift shop.
I talked Gina into going to Big Bend National Park in 1996 and it was so hot and miserable it took 14 years to convince her to return. Now I can’t keep her away from the place. We returned for the third time since that ill-fated mid-90’s trip over the week of Thanksgiving. After the 10-day trip we declared it our best vacation of all-time. (When I say “we” I mean Gina and me. Abby thinks our trip earlier this year to Universal Studios in Orlando has been the best vacation.) We even convinced Nana and Gramps to tag along with us.
I rented a fisheye lens for the trip and I thought it would be funny to break it in with a fish-face portrait. I was impressed with how Abby is really selling it.
We stopped off in Marathon, Texas, for lunch at a classic roadside diner-type establishment.
A couple of actual working cowboys came in and sat at the next table. They ordered iced coffee.
We booked three nights in the Chisos Mountain Lodge inside the park. The rest of the trip would be spent in a couple other places outside the park.
The building in which our room was located was built in the early 40s and it is clearly showing its age, but it’s all about location, right? We were right in the heart of the action and the surroundings were very peaceful. We hardly saw any of the other people staying all around us.
That evening we walked to supper at the lodge restaurant with a nearly full moon rising over the mighty 7,500 foot Casa Grande.
We made our second trip of the year to Florida (see the documentation on our first trip.) This time we hit Gulf Shores, Ala., to do some beachin’.
The first beach trip Gina and I ever made was to Gulf Shores many years ago, but we hadn’t been back since. We have been to Pensacola and Destin a few times each and have always stayed in a regular hotel or one of those high-rise condo monstrosities. For this trip we decided we wanted to try the beach house route. Gina found The Green Heron House on a canal in the heart of Gulf Shores. It was small but quite adequate for our needs.
The house’s namesake patrolling the canal behind the house.
Being a map guy, I enjoyed that the owners had hung up a couple of historical maps of the Alabama gulf coast.
We ate a ton of great food. I remember not being impressed with Gulf Shores’ restaurant options, but this trip was pretty stellar. We discovered that the best eateries were so close by that we could get takeout, avoid the long wait, and still get back to the house with hot food. So we did that several times. S&S Seafood, which is just a takeout joint, not a restaurant, was a great find.
One day we drove over to Pensacola to tour the haunted lighthouse and eat at Crabs We Got ‘Em.
We went a little crazy one day and signed up for the local zip line madness. It was a lot of fun and pretty scary at first. We were pretty impressed that Abby just jumped off the edge of the first tower with zero hesitation.
At one of the stations we were told we needed to go down backwards with our legs propped up in the safety lines in the “torpedo position” because the headwinds would prevent us from reaching the landing area if we went in the front-facing configuration. That was a thrill. All the zip line pics except this one were shot by the venue’s staff photographer.
We capped it all off with a little night crabbing and family beach portraiture.
We had our 20th wedding anniversary in May, so we decided we needed to take a big trip in celebration. We did NYC a few years ago, so we thought we should go the other direction this time and decided on San Francisco.
We had an early flight out of Little Rock and got to SF before noon. After checking into the hotel we headed to find some lunch and fortuitously came upon the Daily Grill right off Union Square. I had fish tacos and it was a 3 FPW lunch.
After strolling through Union Square we headed up, up, up the hill on Mason Street and down the other side. All that talk about SF having steep hills is right on the money.
Near the bottom of the Mason Street hill on the north side, we came to the cable car museum. The giant motors that pull the cables beneath the streets are in open view. The whole system is pretty fascinating.
Next we took a jaunt through Chinatown to our hotel, which was located a half block to the official China Town Tourist Entrance. I guess there’s never a boring day in China Town.
For our last day in Big Bend we went on sort of an aimless ramble over to Lajitas and drove a short distance down the River Road in Big Bend Ranch State Park. We came across the “ghost town” of Contrabando, which is actually a defunct movie set. We had the place all to ourselves. This church facade is probably the most interesting building there. The town sits right on the bank of the Rio Grande and if you stop for moment and let the atmosphere settle around you it really feels like the border circa 1880.
This might be the greatest sign ever. It sits on the outskirts of Terlingua on the road to the west entrance of Big Bend National Park. I mean, you can’t beat free water and hundreds of wind chimes. I imagine the person who painted it spent awhile planning out where they would place each come on for maximum effect. Then they started at the top left and after maybe a whole day of painting finally finished at the bottom right. Then when they finished the job and stood back to admire it, reading from top to bottom, sighed deeply and said, “Screw it. I’m not fixing it. Spell check wouldn’t have even caught it.” I’m sure they’ve endured endless ribbing from the other townfolk.
Late that afternoon I went back to the Terlingua Ghost Town hoping to catch a magnificent sunset over the cemetery. The ghost town is full of roofless abandoned adobe buildings. My awe-inspiring sunset was a no-show again, but I did get to make more sunburst effects as it went down.
Many of the cemetery’s graves are elaborately decorated with figurines, flags, money, beads, and empty alcoholic-drink containers.
With the sunset a bust a searched around looking for anything eye catching. Nearly every grave played host to clear glass jars used to hold candles. Just before I lost the light I noticed how the jars glowed in the golden rays of the fading sun. I then frantically scrambled around looking for the most photogenic jar. I thought this one fit the bill nicely.
We got word early in the morning that someone had held up the evening stage in Terlingua so we put together a posse to find the culprit and string him up. Unfortunately, our posse leader just took us through an area of old mine tailings, a historical dump and an abandoned golf course. The robber got away.
Awesome horse riding sound and you can hear how impressed I am with the posse leader’s tales of past exploits.
Posse Assistant Joe gave us all some training on how to steer a horse. Yes, I know I pretty much look like Teddy Roosevelt in his Rough Rider days. Joe was on the front porch of the stables working on writing a new song when we pulled up.
Abby had been beside herself for days in anticipation of going riding. The posse organizer made her wear a helmet, but by all indications, she had a great time.
The posse leader (whose name I can’t remember) had a specific order in which we had to ride and the horses were not to pass each other. She didn’t tell us, but we were not to dismount the horses, either. Gramps found out about that secret rule the hard way. That put me behind Abby and I exclusively got shots of her back while she was riding.
I did somehow manage to get a nice horseback portrait of Gramps.
This dog greeted us every morning at the duplex. We took to calling him Morning Dog. Gina liked him so much that when she got home she invented an imaginary dog named scout based on Morning Dog. Except Scout wears a bandanna around his neck.
That evening we went to the Starlight Theater, the hub of the local tourist industry, located at a historic abandoned mining village known as Terlingua Ghost Town. The restaurant/performance hall and associated souvenir store is just funky enough to not scare the tourists away while keeping the locals coming back.
The place has a few works by local artists for sale.
This is a confusing situation because a couple days later in the town of Lajitas we saw a live goat in a pen with a sign proclaiming it as “Clay Henry the mayor of Lajitas”. Some research reveals that this is the original Clay Henry and he’s had an interesting go of it in both life and death.
I don’t know this duo’s name, but I saw the guitar player playing a coffee can on the front porch of the store on our first day in town. He must really love music.
I had a filet with some sort of demi glace and mashed potatoes and a locally brewed beer. I gave the meal the extremely rare Golden FPW. It was that good.
Terlingua seems to have a certain type of dog – very laid back, but looking like they are very experienced. I’m sure they all have tangled with a skunk or two and rolled around in the carcass of a road-killed deer and narrowly escaped a rattlesnake bite. See that our-of-focus guitar player in the background? That’s Joe from the posse mentioned earlier. He said he had played his new song and had gotten compliments on it. I’m sorry I missed it.
Behind the store and restaurant in the ghost town proper, there’s an old Catholic church that is still in use. It’s got great details.
A minute before I took this shot the entire sky was on fire. I was too busy jacking around and missed it.
Day 2 dawned miserable. Rainy and chilly. So we decided to get some indoor touristing out of the way. We hit the subway for the first time and rode the uptown C train from the 50 Street Station to the American Museum of Natural History. The subway stopped in the basement of the museum. In the lobby were probably 1,000 people in line for tickets. The museum probably loves cold and rainy weather. Also in the lobby was a super-tall skeleton of a barosaurus.
Abby, Aunt Jodie and I headed to my Mom and Dad’s place in southeast Kansas for a little Easter frivolity. Gina was on injured reserve with a bum shoulder and didn’t make the traveling squad this time. Abby and Jodie held a traditional Easter egg dying party on Saturday.
The drive between Nashville and Little Rock goes through Memphis, and Memphis is home to some great barbecue joints, and since I’m a barbecue lover it was only right to stop off for lunch on our way home. Gina is generally not big on barbecue, but she loves Rendezvous and the dry-rub heaven they serve, so that was the ticket. (Our waiter took the group shot of us above.)
The restaurant is located in an alley in downtown Memphis and when we turned the corner we saw a big table loaded down with merchandise advertising the University of North Carolina. I thought “now that’s odd.” And then i remembered the NCAA basketball tournament was in town. Because Rendezvous is world famous, I braced for a long wait for a table even though it was 2 p.m.