Quite often the best places are off the beaten path.
Big Bend National Park is one of those places. Hours from everywhere it's a desert beauty waiting to be explored but first, there must be coffee.
This little coffee shop attached to one of the excursions places was our morning caffeine stop. We were there so often the guy serving coffee recognized our vehicle when we ordered...not us but the Iron Butterfly. Unfortunately we were never there early enough to snag a breakfast sandwich, they were always sold out.
With an impressive 801,163 acres, Big Bend is the 15th largest national park. There's a lot to see and do here.
A popular activity is photography. Dave decided how I was taking photos was amusing, so he took one of me, taking one of a cactus.
Another popular activity in the park is visiting the hot springs which is about a quarter mile walk in past a small museum and along towering cliffs. In the early 1900s a man named J.O. Langford built a bathhouse here where the hot springs merges with the Rio Grande and charged 10 cents a day or $2 for a 21 day treatment.
The bathhouse has long since been in ruins but it's still a hot spot for tourists.
If you bring your passport you can legally cross the border into Mexico to visit the very small town of Boquillas.
This is an interesting experience. The Rio Grande is no so grande these days. In fact, if you wish, you can walk across it right into Mexico since it's only about 25 feet across and less than two feet along this stretch.
Sometimes you don't want to stand out as a tourist and somedays it's far more fun to embrace it. Not wanting to take our hiking boots off just to cross the creek formally known as the Rio Grande, we paid the $5 a person to be ferried back and forth.
Yep, some guy wades in shallow water dragging a flat bottom boat across as a ferry.
To continue with being a full on tourist, we rented two horses to ride the three quarters of a mile to and from town.
At the time, we didn't realize renting the horses also meant we had our own personal guide, Antonio.
Antonio didn't speak much but he accompanied us along the road, led us to one of the two restaurants, took our drink order, and stayed with us until we were back on the ferry.
This only required two hours of his time as Boquillas is beyond tiny. Still, it was a lot of fun.
Technically, the park has off-roading trails but we only came across one very short space where a regular car couldn't make it as long as they were watching for drops into the washes crossing the road. We assumed the 4x4 only signs were to keep traffic down.
These backroads did lead us to an abandoned mine way in the back country.
Mariscal Mine was once a primary source of quicksilver. For forty years it provided almost one quarter of the total mercury produced by the US. Left to the desert since the 1940s, it sits like a hilltop fortress. A reminder of days past.
We were surprised during our outings by the quantity of "wild" horses we came across just being themselves. We were told these were immigrants crossing the river because they could. Not sure if that is true or not. They certainly were not afraid of humans but out of respect for the wildlife we maintained a safe distance, except from the group that didn't want to share the road. We squeaked by them.
Last but certainly not least, Big Bend is dark sky country. This means there are many places with minimal to no light pollution interfering with star gazing. It's truly spectacular. While we were not skilled enough to take pictures which would do the night sky justice, we did manage to take a few acceptable photos of the evenings.
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