From the city to the desert, from hubbub to stillness

April 15, 2018

Ba-ba-ba Bamba…… was playing as we sat on the top of a double decker bus and toured San Antonio. We had a 3 day Mega-Pass so we could hop-on-hop-off the bus all over town. We saw the Alamo, saw an IMAX movie about the Battle of the Alamo, toured the Buckhorn Saloon to learn about the Texas Rangers and saw Bonnie and Clyde’s car full of bullet holes. We floated down the River and walked the River walk in different areas of it. We ate BLT’s at the charming Guenther house – where a German started a mill in the 1800’s and there is still Pioneer flour made nearby.  We skipped the 3 lb cinnamon roll and had peach strudel instead.

I forgot to mention last week that probably our favorite thing in New Orleans was the WWII museum. We could have stayed there 2 or more days. Tickets for the Movie there sell out fast. We were reminded of the Japanese interment during the war and how many manufacturing sites stopped making appliances, etc. in order to make war supplies. New Orleans was the site where many submarines and boats were made during the war. Later we met a couple who knew women who learned welding during the war and used their skills on farming machinery later in life.

So when we toured the beautiful Japanese Gardens in San Antonio and saw the sign said “Chinese” gardens we were confused until we learned that the sign had been changed during the war to prevent vandalism and that the Japanese family that had built and cared for it for years was interred in a camp during the war. Major upkeep was needed after the war but the family never returned. The family’s daughters were present in the 70’s when newly renovated gardens were celebrated.

We were parked south of San Antonio in a place called Von Ormy. So we would take the car north to San Antonio where we walked 3-5 miles each day in the city. We spent several evenings around a fire at our campground talking with two couples from Minnesota. Our last evening we drove north of San Antonio to San Marcos and had tacos at Torchy Tacos with my niece Rachel and her husband Daniel. She is about 39 weeks pregnant and seeing midwives in Austin at a birth center—yay!

And then we drove into the desert. We stayed one night in Fort Stockton, TX where we wondered if the wind would blow our RV over. The dust was thick. A sign in the RV park office said, “No, the wind does not always blow this hard, sometimes it blows harder”.

More driving on Saturday into the desert where one can see no homes or people for miles and miles. We occasionally saw cattle and wondered what they could find to eat and understood why they would need miles and miles of ranch land in order to survive. It seemed the scenery changed every 20 minutes as the mesas and Chisos mountains appeared.

We are now truly off the grid. No electric, no water or sewer. The refrigerator is running on LP, the furnace runs on LP, and the A/C runs on the generator. We are parked on the shores of the Rio Grande and it is so so beautiful. This morning we listened to a Park Ranger to learn about the wildlife, the ecosystem, the controlled fires, the cooperation of the Mexican and US government to preserve the ecosystem of both borders. We hiked where we touch the waters of the Rio Grande, and got up high enough we could see our campground and the Rio Grande at the same time.

I am grateful for science informed conservationists in the past and present. I hope lack of truth and scientific facts does not make us lose these precious miles of beauty in the future.

The idea of a wall at this border along the Rio Grande is both ludicrous and evil.  As Steve says, “Show me a 20 foot wall and I’ll show you a 25 foot ladder”. We have seen that Mexican artists come over the border to leave items for sale like brightly painted walking sticks and tarantulas and road runners made of colorful beads. They leave a bottle for the money. The rangers try to remove them when but it looks to us that someone replaces them very rapidly.

The Rio Grande has shrunk-- and we could see the top of our RV to the right of the river.

So instead of the hustle and bustle of the city we are in a place of absolute quiet and stillness. No generators between 8p and 8a. Because there is no light pollution they say the skies  here have the most stars visible anywhere in the U.S. I feel far away from all that is familiar and yet feel this quiet  and beauty is why we came.

(No pics today. We drove miles to get a weak internet....will add them later.