Tin Can Travels

27th Dec – 3rd Jan

We pulled out of our camp in Monument Valley and headed north, although then we were going south and then the tarmac ran out in a decidedly rough settlement of native homes. So before we became the protagonists in a scary movie plot, we back tracked and found the correct road, and then we were actually heading north. We had booked three nights in a small town called Bluff which was only about 40 miles away. It was on our road to Moab and had 3 or 4 restaurants and an old historic fort and a museum to amuse us. The managers of the RV park were away and had left us a welcome pack outside the office. As we pulled in it was fairly obvious why they had taken the opportunity to take off. The place was deserted.

We parked up near the tiny shed that housed the single toilet and shower and after lunch walked down the road into ‘town’ to assess the offerings. All four restaurants, the visitors centre, the museum, the fort and the laundry were all closed. The only open place was the petrol station/shop, so we called in to confirm that Bluff was indeed ‘shut’. We bought beer and headed back to assess our options. Three nights was going to be entirely excessive but snow was forecast overnight and it seemed silly to be planning to move on the next day when the roads were still being cleared. We could amuse ourselves for two nights. I messaged the managers who agreed to refund us our 3rd night, and advised us that they were sure that the restaurant at the other end of town was open the next day. The beer and a mini scrabble tournament killed the rest of the day and when we woke in the morning, it had indeed snowed, and was still snowing. This was a little bit exciting for us as we have lived in the sub-tropics for 16 years and only seen snow on a few ski trips. After a very lazy morning we rugged up and set off on our day’s expedition: a two mile walk to see if the restaurant really was open for lunch. We were, as usual, the lone pedestrians. Cars, trucks and RVs were passing through town caked in filthy snow and ice. The roads were open, but it didn’t look like fun out there. We were happy on foot and holed up in our private camp-ground for two. We turned the last corner, empty of stomach and full of hope, and were very pleased to see the carpark of Twin Rocks Cafe full and the doors open for business. Hoorah! We indulged again in the lusciousness that is Navajo fry bread, hot chilli, and a burger. And then we walked home again. Busy day.

The next day we headed up to Moab. This is the town that services Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and is surrounded by lots of other state parks and miles and miles of off road driving trails. It is a playground town, full of businesses catering to the bazillions of people that head to this area in spring, summer and autumn to ‘recreate’, visit the parks, and hire wrangler jeeps and go trail bashing. It was much quieter at this time of year. The snow had petered out as we approached Moab and the sun was shining, but it was cold. We stocked up on provisions in town and then found our camp which was about 2 miles north. There was a good cycle trail back to town and we were confident that this would be achievable on bicycles to get back from a bar on New Years!

For those of you following the US news, you will be aware that the federal government standoff/shutdown had affected the National Park Service. The Utah State government had realised that, even in the winter, its National Parks of Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce and Zion are the main reason that many tourists, us included, visit the state and it had agreed to provide interim funding to its parks to keep them open, so we were going to be fine….

The next day was gloriously sunny, but Nick was struck down by a cold, and didn’t feel like doing anything. So we didn’t. We had bags of time to visit the parks…but then it snowed overnight. We woke on New Years Eve morning to four inches of snow. Snow that the National Parks had no extra funding in place to clear with snow ploughs. So they shut anyway. There seemed little point off loading Tin Can from Big D as there was nowhere really to go.

We assessed our options for New Years Eve celebrations. Our research discovered that the only bar actually open all the way up to, and beyond, midnight was at the other end of town, 3 miles away, and now our ‘easy cycle path’ into town was a now an icy, slushy, filthy, partially obscured adventure death-trap trail. A dicey prospect even in daylight and sober, let alone well-oiled at 1.00am on a freezing inky dark night. So we resigned ourselves to the prospect of a Tin Can New Year’s Eve, and decided to go out for lunch instead. The rest of the morning was filled with that very grown up and mature activity: building a snowman. This took longer than expected as the snow was very dry, but we persevered and created ‘Mo’ (short for Moab)

Lunchtime was then upon us and we set off walking, gingerly, and of course alone, along the aforementioned cycle trail, committing to stopping at the first eating establishment that we came to. This was a Denny’s at the one mile mark. It appeared like an oasis in the cold, snowy desert and we celebrated the outgoing year with a gallon of diet coke and a pile of hot, unhealthy food. Perfect!

2019 saw itself in. This was the first New Year’ that I have slept through since I was in my early teens. Our plans had been different, but what with Nick’s residual snot situation and temperatures falling to -17 deg C / 2 deg F at night, curling up in bed under our entire blanket collection was by far and away the more attractive option.

We woke up in 2019 to ice on the inside of Tin Can despite having had the heating going full chat all night. The day was sunny, but the temperature didn’t rise above -4 C/ 24 F all day. The upcoming days were showing no signs of temperatures increasing. The nearby parks we still closed with no prospect of opening. Our next planned destination, Bryce Canyon National Park at 8,000ft, was likely to be colder and shut now if it had snowed and definitely shut in a few days once the emergency funding ran out. After that, Zion National park, would also shut once funding expired if the shutdown continued. The combination of the partial federal shutdown, and winter conditions much harsher than we had expected meant that our Utah experience was falling way short of expectations. We had ANOTHER reassessment of plans. We came to the following decisions:

1. Living in a RV is way more fun when the temperatures are above freezing.
2. We knew that the Utah parks were amazing and we have the luxury of being able to come back to experience them in all their glory, sunshine and fully staffed orderliness later in the year.
3. There was no point staying in Moab. We would (begrudgingly) back-track through Monument Vally and head to the Grand Canyon as our next stop, before, not after, Las Vegas.
4. On our way to the Grand Canyon we would have a night in a hotel. A warm, dry hotel room with no ice on the inside. And a bath. This was to be my birthday present to me.

Of course everything was closed on the 1st, so difficult to action our changes, so we loafed. We needed to do laundry but the park’s machines were out of order due to frozen pipes, and we needed antifreeze. The temperatures were going to be equally low for the next few nights, so on the hotel night, when we weren’t going to be staying in TC, so it was going to be better to winterise, even for just one night. On the 2nd Jan we unplugged and drove into town, got the stuff, did the stuff, came back, plugged back in and made our bookings. By now Nick was feeling much better, but predictably I now had The Cold. Oh Happy Winter.

After another bitterly cold night we sorted ourselves out on the morning of the 3rd Jan, did the winterisation (draining the water and replacing it with antifreeze ) and headed back down the road we had driven up 8 days earlier. This would have been a bit depressing if it hadn’t been such a beautiful drive. The landscapes on this section of this trip have been universally stunning. The sun was shining, all the roads were clear and we pulled into our hotel carpark in Tuba City at about 4pm.

My birthday hotel room was in a newly built Navajo owned hotel, the only half decent establishment in this area. To get a big bath we had booked a very reasonably priced ‘luxury one bedroom suite’. This was about 10 times the size of TC and was notable for its size rather than its luxury, but it was perfect. On check-in we had to declare that we were not going to smoke and not going to bring any pets or alcohol into the hotel. We could honestly declare that our overnight bag (very stylish re-useable shopping bag) definitely didn’t contain contraband cats or poodles, but we might have lied about the six-pack… How naughty.

The bath was bliss and I spent so long in it that I was minutes away from morphing into a dolphin. I was lured out of the water for dinner which was at the diner next to the hotel, another Denny’s. Never been to one before, now this was our second visit in 4 days. We spent the rest of the evening romantically watching different things on different TVs in different rooms of our suite. After many months of 24/7 living in each other’s pockets, this was also a little bit of bliss. I had a terrible night’s sleep with a completely blocked up nose, but was very thankful to be miserable in a huge bed in a massive, warm hotel room. Of course I managed to squeeze in another bath in the morning, we had breakfast and then hit the road again. Next stop, the Grand Canyon.

22nd – 27th Dec

Monument Valley. It is not hard to see how it got its name. The Monuments, or buttes, seem to rise up from the flat valley floor like a motley band of giants, overseeing the craziness of man. Man in car. Man in camper van. Man filming movies. Man taking photos. This is one of the most iconic landscapes on the planet, a place to see, to be in. A place to spend our first ever Christmas À Deux. Of course, the buttes don’t rise up. They are just the last bits of a prehistoric plateau to crumble away. The whole place is actually disintegrating and one could wonder what the chances are of being crushed by a massive slice of rock falling from a butte face. Epitaph writing would be easy. ‘Her monumental butt was kicked by a Monumental Butte’. But I digress.

As I told you previously, we headed here a day earlier than planned, on a gorgeous late afternoon with the low winter sun lighting up the Monuments which glowed pink, leaving Arizona and entering Utah just as they started to come into view. The options for camping at this time of year are limited, and we were booked into a place called Gouldings. This is named after a Harry and his wife, ‘Mike’ Goulding, an intrepid couple who started a trading post in the 1920s. This has grown into a sprawling business including a motel, cottages, restaurant, gift shop, museum, petrol station, laundrette, grocery store and our RV park. Despite a small flurry of increased visitors over the holiday week, this is a very quiet time of year and we were easily accommodated a day early. In fact, we had our pick of sites and so chose the site at the very front of the park with an unobstructed view of the Monuments, a big space with a fire pit and a handy tree for the Christmas lights.

Due to desert dryness, and being in town parks, there had been fire restrictions in most places we had been this year, our last fire having been in Pigeon forge, 11 weeks ago. We were very excited at the prospect of more camp fires here and bought up a significant portion of the camp shop’s wood supply. After the small stresses of the day, our first evening was a blissful combination of the amazing view, beautiful sunset, full-moon rise and a few hours sitting around the fire, under our tree bedecked with red fairy lights, on a cold crisp evening in a deserted campsite.

The Gouldings complex sits at the edge of the Valley with its back to two large buttes, the RV campsite being about half a mile up the road that cuts up between them. Everything looks at ‘that view’. We wandered down the hill on the first day for a fossick around. We visited the small museum and large gift shop and checked out the restaurant for dinner that evening. We got some idea of how busy this place can get in peak season given the amount of accomodation, the number of campsites and the number of tables in the restaurant. Bananas. On the way home we called into the grocery store which was surprisingly well stocked, with one notable exception. Booze. All this area is still Navajo Nation land, so dry. Alcohol-free beer and wine is available in the restaurants and grocery stores, but there is no alcohol to be bought. (We had known this before we arrived and were prepared. The back seats of Big Dave were mostly given over to our stocks of beer, with the odd bottle of fizz, vodka, rum and whisky thrown in for Christmas cheer. Monument Valley, BYO). We walked back up the hill and hung out for a few hours, and then walked back down again for dinner. The cold evening met its perfect antidote in the form of two bowls of hot chilli served with the gloriousness that is Navajo fry bread. A frisbee-sized disc of oily naughtiness. After dinner we went over to another of Gouldings offerings, a small movie theatre that has nightly shows of old John Wayne movies that were filmed here. Monument Valley has been used as a backdrop in many movies, of which five starred John Wayne. We were treated to the 1939 movie ‘Stagecoach’, directed by John Ford, a man who directed so many movies out here that he has an area of the park named after him.

The next day we explored a few of the trails around the area. One of these was up to a small arch behind camp, and another was round the base of one of the nearby buttes giving us a much wider view of the Monuments.

On this second trail we also unexpectedly had more of a view than we really needed of a romantic tryst between a local native couple. Unnoticed, we backtracked and sat on a rock out of sight for ten minutes awaiting finalisation of events. They then left in different directions, with a stagger of a few minutes. How clandestine! We finished our walk with no more voyeuristic episodes and popped into the store for a few last minute provisions for Christmas dinner. In a fit of domestic goddessness, I made cranberry sauce and a loaf of bread in the afternoon and as dusk approached we lit the campfire again and had our first games of ‘weasel bag’ (aka corn hole) of this trip. Hampson kicked my butte.

And so to Christmas Day! The morning consisted of a hearty cooked breakfast, a gallon of coffee and opening our presents to each other. The offerings were a combination of frivolous and useful things to aid entertainment and staying warm. I got a book of poetry by Neruda, called Ode To Common Things. Here is a passage from a poem entitled ‘Ode To The Cat’:

‘There was something wrong/ with the animals:/ their tails were too long, and they had/ unfortunate heads./ They started coming together,/ little by little/ fitting together to make a landscape,/ developing birthmarks, grace, pep./ But the cat,/ only the cat,/ turned out finished,/ and proud:/ born in a state of total completion,/ it sticks to itself and knows exactly what it wants.’ -Neruda.

After all the excitement of all the unwrapping, we made very small piles of our gifts, wrapped up warm and set off for another walk. This was up a short canyon and took us close up to some very impressive rock faces. After building the obligatory inukshuk (apologies to the Inuit),

we wandered home and spent an hour or so sharing drinks and nibbles with our neighbours before, unfortunately, it started to rain.

This sent us all scurrying back inside our respective Tin Cans where we had our fairly traditional Christmas dinner: a tiny chicken each, draped in bacon, stuffed, with roasties, brussell sprouts and gravy, with, of course, homemade cranberry sauce. Yum. We ate too much to eat dessert. Just as dusk fell, the rain stopped, giving us a moody view of the monuments, and we managed to squeeze in another fire.

Hoorah! To cap it all off, we found Love Actually on TV in the evening. All in all, it was a lovely, low key Christmas Day. A wintery Christmas after many Southern hemisphere years. We had managed to speak to all the UK and Australian families and went to bed happy.

Boxing Day saw most of the other campers in the park move on, leaving us in almost an empty park. We did some festive laundry, did another short walk and yes, had another campfire. It is a kind of obsession. The next day we headed off. We had spent 5 mostly gloriously sunny days gazing at the Monuments from afar, and when it came to the prospect of driving the park loop road to get up close and personal to them, we decided that we didn’t need to do this. Somehow it was going to change how we saw them. So we stayed at a distance, and headed northwards. Our next stop, a small settlement called Bluff, just 40 or so miles away.

18th – 22st Dec

From Casa Grande, just south of Phoenix, we headed north. This was a ‘highway day’, a 200 mile straight-line drive with a 6000ft gain of elevation. Destination, Flagstaff. Today we bade farewell to the mild temperatures of the desert lowlands and headed to the hills and to winter proper. With sub-freezing overnight temperatures, and some persisting snow piles from the last winter storm, this was to to be where the summer clothes finally got put away, and operation ‘stay warm’ began.

We didn’t stop in Phoenix, the largest state capitol in the country. We were swept through it on the urban highway, surrounded by hurtling cars and trucks, many with no concept of indicators, stopping distances or the ‘passing on the left’ rule. The usual considerate driving manners of the American motorist do not seem to apply on Interstate highways where they become cast members of Fast and Furious. It is interesting that this does not seem to provoke any road rage incidents (that we have seen) and I surmise that the widespread carrying of firearms is the reason for this. It was a tense 20 mins, but we got through without incident. North of Phoenix the road climbed to a desolate plateau and we rolled onwards and upwards for the next 2 hours. The scenery just continued to be magnificent. It seems endless.

Flagstaff is at 7000ft and is a city of about 70,000. It is busy place, being situated at a junction of 2 major Interstates and it is a major railway hub. The Grand Canyon is only about 70 miles from here, but our route there will be a longer way round, passing up into Utah and doing a big loop of the big National Parks before heading back to The Grand Canyon, another 1000 miles or so. Our RV park here was called Blackbarts, co-located with a locally renowned steak restaurant and bar of the same name. (Pro.) It was an easy 15 minute cycle to town on dedicated bike trails, (Pro.) and there were shops for us to do our ‘limited-budget-stocking-filler-only’ Christmas shopping for each other. (Pro.) It also had a restaurant in town that served the finest Cornish pasties and scotch eggs that we have ever consumed. (Big Pro, apologies to Cornwall and Yorkshire (look it up)!). It was a bit noisy because the camp was right next to the aforementioned highway and railway. (Con.) It was cold at night (Con.)

Below freezing temps overnight meant that we had to work a bit harder to stay warm. Tin Can is ‘Four Seasons’ certified, meaning that it is (sort of) insulated and has an LPG furnace heater. This ducts some warm air around the internal pipes and tanks meaning that they stay defrosted but the hose connection to the mains water needed disconnecting at night. There are also some insulated pads to put up at the ceiling vents and I have fashioned some blanket covers for the door and windows. Condensation is the scourge of winter camping and all the hard work of keeping warm at night is undone by having to open everything up in the daytime to dry out. At least the sun is usually shining and the ambient humidity is low so this is a manageable battle currently. It doesn’t seem that long ago since we were in Galveston, Tx, in 95F/35C temps with 100% humidity, having to sit inside with the air con blasting. I can safely say that the middle ground is a sweet spot in the RV life, but we are not miserable. We would much rather be trying to stay warm than battling heat and humidity, and that is why, I remind myself, we are here at this time of year.

On one of our evenings here we made the long trek (about 50 paces) to the steak restaurant for dinner. This was a quirky place with a large main room, a small seperate bar with real life saloon doors and a roaring log fire in the foyer area flanked by couple of comfy seats. We deliberately went over a bit early, and annexed the fireside spot with our pre-dinner drinks. Our steaks were respectable, although the meal might have been enhanced by them being served at the same time, but the defining feature of the evening was the musical revue. At regular intervals the wait staff would take turns to sing a song on a small stage in the corner of the dining room, accompanied on the piano by a lady that looked like every primary school music teacher that I have ever come across. Every so often all the staff would stop in their tracks and sing a chorus-line tune. It was quite entertaining, but probably explains why the service wasn’t perfect.

From Flagstaff we headed east to the town of Holbrook. This seemed a bit counterintuitive to the overarching East-West itinerary of this trip, but that’s where our next destination, The Petrified Forest National Park is. This park protects an area of large fossilised tree trunks, and was about a 20km drive from our overnight camp. Our plan was to do a drive-through of the park, stopping for a couple of short hikes, and then continue on our journey up north to Utah. Well that was the plan until the small matter of a man wanting a wall and because he didn’t get it, partly shutting down the federal government. And that included the National Park funding. This was what greeted us at the entrance to the Petrified Forest.

Well that was a waste of time and fuel. We were slightly apprehensive about what the shut-down might mean for the next month of our trip, which was entirely centred around the National Parks of Utah. It was too early to tell. We got back on the road, retraced our steps back to Holbrook and then northwards.

We hadn’t forward booked our next night’s park, but were headed to a town called Chinle, a service town in the middle of Navajo Nation lands. It is home to The Canyon De Chelly, a mini version of the Grand Canyon, managed by the National Park Service, with a small first-come-first-served campsite co-located with the visitors centre. (Can you see where this is is going…?)

The drive up to Chinle, about 100 miles was another deserted road through the wilderness. Miles and miles of nothingness with the odd flimsy house/shack/mobile home surrounded by a halo of rotting vehicles. People are poor here. There were a few cars headed south, but no-one else going in our direction, which was a bit disconcerting. We arrived in Chinle and it was a very bleak place. A chaotic collection of prefab buildings, high razor-wire fences surrounding government agency compounds and litter everywhere. Our low of the morning was deepening. We left the main road and drove the 5 miles up to the Canyon. Of course the visitor centre and the campsite were both closed. There were no real other choices for camping, and besides, we didn’t want to be here.

We took a quick look at the Canyon from a couple of lookouts. Going for a walk was not an option. As this is Navajo Nation land, you can only enter the Canyon with a licensed guide. We had a short pow-wow (pun intended, and code for a short irritable marital discussion) and decided to hit the road again. Our planned destination for the next night, and Christmas, was Monument Valley. It was easily within striking distance that afternoon and we were confident our park would be able to accomodate us a day early. The next two hours of driving were along one of the most magnificent roads that we have travelled so far. A road of no name, with no credentials, featuring in no ‘top-roads-to-travel’ lists, and certainly with no instagram followers. We cheered up quickly and enjoyed the ride, rolling into Monument Valley during the amazing light of late afternoon and a fantastic sunset.

9th -18th Dec

We began this trip, as we did last year, with no real fixed itinerary. Save for a few specific dates like meeting friends in Tennessee, our college football game in Texas, a weekend to come in Las Vegas with my brother, and obviously our end date, we have made our plans as we go along. But there comes a point, as we approach the final month or so, when we start ‘back-filling’ the bookings. We also had to think where we wanted to be, and where we could be, for Christmas and New Year, especially as this seemed to be coinciding with being at altitude, in the desert, in winter, in areas totally geared up for spring, summer and autumn tourism. Our itinerary was starting to firm up and we realised that we were a bit ahead of schedule with some days in hand. For this reason, and because we had been in the relative wilderness for 5 weeks, we booked ourselves into a city centre RV park in Tucson for 8 nights. Civilisation!

At first glance our park was quite austere. A small tarmac lot, surrounded by a tall wall with a large electronic gate, sandwiched between an apartment complex and a small school. It turned out to be a fantastic base for our week of city life. There was a supermarket and hardware store over the road, a long riverside cycle path a few hundred metres away and good bike and walking routes into downtown, which was only a mile or two away. There was also a great clubhouse space complete with pool table, table football and ping pong table, all of which were like private facilities as no-one else seemed to ever use them. My pool did improve a little, but I cannot compete with Hampson’s skills. His tertiary education was in English, History and Pool.

We walked and cycled a lot in Tucson. The manageress of the park thought we were crazy when we told her we had walked the 6km to a shopping mall one day. 4kms to a hairdressers another day (Well it is rare to fine a Toni & Guy!). Cycled 25 km along the river around town on the cycle paths and another day cycled up the steep road to the top of Sentinel Peak, or ‘A’ Mountain. This peak is a small cone-shaped hill overlooking the CBD and was a few km from camp. It is called ‘A’ mountain for the large whitewashed stone ‘A’ constructed on its upper face by freshmen University of Arizona in 1915. This has been maintained by subsequent generations of UA students.

Christmas is definitely on its way and I have managed to find a teeny-tiny TinCan appropriate tree. This is Albert. Named for the supermarket chain, Albertsons from which he was procured. He is 42cm tall including the pot and has a daily trip outside to photosynthesise.

Our stay coincided with the city’s ‘Parade of Lights’, a Christmas parade by any other name. This was a convoy of fifty or so vehicles, private and municipal, bedecked with countless strands of fairy lights and festive decorations. It was very pretty and as we stood in the cool and dark, all wrapped up, it made us quite nostalgic for the Northern Hemisphere winter Christmas. Despite sixteen years of living in the Southern Hemisphere, the concept of a summer Christmas, complete with long warm days, broad daylight parades, BBQs and salads has never really made sense. Just not cold and miserable enough ‘down under’.

A trip to the movies was too far to cycle and required a voyage by Uber, another advantage of city living. We went to see Mortal Engines (Hampson’s choice). This was not only in 3D, but in those fancy D-box seats too. These are reclining Lazy Boy style seats that move and shudder in synch with the action. Another level in movie going experience! Despite being only the second day since the movie’s release there were only about six others watching with us. Perhaps not the box office hit that it was hoped to be, although we both really enjoyed it.

Our weather here was delightful for the whole week. T-shirt weather in the day and not cold enough to need the heater on at night and bone dry. It is easy to see why the Snow Birds all flock from Canada and the Northern states to spend winters in these benign conditions. We spoke to the locals that we met about the heat of the summer. Its not bad, apparently, as long as you don’t go outside at all. Our Uber driver to the cinema was originally from Sudan. He thought it was too hot. Our homeward bound driver was one of the most verbose humans we have ever encountered. Like an olympian for chit-chat. Astounding.

Tucson is sandwiched between East and West Saguaro National Parks, the only National Parks created to preserve a specific species of plant, the very impressive and characterful Saguaro cactus. This is a very slow growing species that can be up to 70 years old before they start to sprout the branches like arms that can make them look very human. They stand like an army of upright soldiers on the hillsides, looking like they are waiting for something. As we left Tucson we headed out to Saguaro West, first stopping at the quite stupendously impressive Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. This is a zoological park that apparently is routinely listed in the top ten of its kind in the world. It is a 100 acre park with walking trails through the desert terrain and various exhibits of native animals like coyote, javelinas, mountain lions, beavers, otters, birds reptiles and spiders. It also, a bit bizarrely had a small aquarium and a stingray petting exhibit. My favourite area was the walk-in hummingbird aviary. There were 20-30 beautifully colourful tiny hummingbirds free-flying around our heads and drinking from eye level feeding stations. It was magical. After we left the museum we drove through the park, admiring the Saguaro, and then onward to our next stop a couple of hours up the road, an overnighter at a large park in Casa Grande. It was fine.

Visiting Tombstone was a bit of a dog-leg in our trip, but this place has been so immortalised in our childhood consciousnesses by Hollywood that we couldn’t resist spending a few days here.

The Wild West town, like many others of its era, was a mining boom town. Silver was the prize. It was founded in 1879 and grew from a population of 100 to 14000 over 7 years. Unfortunately in the mid-1880s the mines hit the water table and although heavy duty pumps kept the mines dry for a while a fire in 1886 destroyed the pump house and the pumps and mining was abandoned. It had a hay day of a mere 7 years. The town clung on by the skin of its teeth only because it was the county seat until 1929, avoiding becoming one of the many ghost towns left behind by the mining busts, and managing to retain its Wild West flavour.  It also owes its survival to the lore and legend of its most famed event: The 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral.  

This was a showdown between lawmen ‘goodies’: Virgil, Wyatt and Morgan Earp and their dentist/gambling associate, Doc Holliday, who shot and killed cowboy ‘baddies’: Tom and Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton.  The exact spot of the gunfight is preserved, with a mannequin mock-up of the protagonists in their various positions, but there is also a live re-enactment show of events nearby.  The lead up, and fallout of this 30 second short moment in time captured the imagination of Hollywood and is the setting and backstory for at least eight movies, a few TV shows and several songs. The town is a ready-made film set. The preserved main street is made from packed earth, lined with wooden verandas, a thoroughfare for horse-drawn buggies and lots of folks were walking around dressed un-ironically as cowboys, holstered revolvers on hips.  This is the only place that we have seen civilians openly carrying firearms.  And it all seems entirely normal.  

Our stop for two nights was a small camp right in the middle of town. It was only about 50 metres from the OK Corral and the soundtrack to our stay was Ennio Morricone spaghetti western tracks and blank gunfire from the hourly re-enactment shows. Very mood inducing. We arrived in the tail end of the rain, get wet setting up, and then the sun came out again. Normal desert winter weather was resumed.  We went full ‘tourist‘ during our stay, which is the only way to go here.  We went to the gunfight show, toured the OK Corral site and associated museum exhibits, saw the film and cheesy, but quite impressive and informative, revolving diorama show, walked the streets having bizarrely developed slight swaggers and ‘itchy revolver hands’, had ‘old time photos’ taken in fancy dress, shot paintballs from a revolver at man-sized targets in a shooting alley and drank at the original long mahogany bar in an establishment called ‘Big Nose Kate’s’. (The Kate in question was the prostitute and on-off girlfriend of our gunfighting dentist, Doc Holliday. ) This is definitely a destination for the ‘themed party gathering’. There are numerous stores doing Wild West costume rental and sales, although not in great numbers whilst we were here.  We did, however, see a group of four grown men wandering around in lion and tiger onesies. Either a case of wrong town or wrong costumes. Best not to ask.

I wonder what all the 1880s townsfolk would have thought about the craziness of the 21st century tourism in Tombstone, but I suspect that life was a much bigger heap of bonkers back then. 

5th – 7th Dec

We left Roswell on a cold, cold morning having had to deal with our first frozen water hosepipe of the trip.  It wasn’t too much of a drama as the solution was to use water from the tank (which happily is kept liquid by the heating system) for essentials whilst the hose defrosted in the shower. We knew the deal when we made the decision to make this an Autumn/Winter trip but even the mild southern winters of the USA can get far colder than the winterless north of NZ. Throw in a few mountains, and this is going to be a shock to the system, especially as we have been avoiding winter altogether over the past few years.  

We headed west across the plains of New Mexico. This bit is enchanting, and now its name of ‘Land of Enchantment’ makes a lot more sense.  The road carved through miles and miles of empty plains, mostly devoid of any evidence of humans. West Texas was massive, but never felt as empty as this part of New Mexico. In the distance a mountain range loomed and eventually we reached it and climbed over it. There was snow at the top. There was also a tribal reservation and a petrol station with a casino. Or was it a casino with a petrol station? Not sure, but surely bizarre. We refuelled, resisted the urge to have a late morning game of roulette and descended the other side. As we were presented with the view of the huge flat Tularosa basin on the other side we had our first glimpse of the reason we have come this way. Gypsum fields or white sands. 

The nearest town to White Sands is called Alamogordo.  It appears fairly unprepossessing but surprisingly large and one could wonder why on earth it was here. All to service tourists visiting sand dunes? No. There is another fairly interesting reason. Tularosa basin is home to Holloman Airforce Base and The White Sands Missile Testing Range; a significant contribution to space innovation and exploration was made here.  The Trinity site, where the first atomic bomb was tested, is near here. The Space Shuttle landed here several times. HAM, the space chimp, was trained here.

HAM (Short for Holloman Aerospace Medical centre) was born in Cameroon, came to the USA after he was granted a green card (or stolen by poachers, one of the two,) and at 2 years of age was chosen from a group of 40 little hairy astronauts to be the first hominid to go on, and safely return from, a space flight. He was trained to do some tasks of earth, rewarded with a little banana pellet if he did them, punished with an electric shock if he didn’t, and then the space scientists compared his performance on earth to that in space. He was nearly as good in orbit, and all his vital signs were stable throughout, thus proving than humans could probably safely travel to space.  He retired after his flight and lived in a zoo in Washington DC for 17 years, and then moved to a North Carolina zoo with a colony of chimps for his last 2 years, dying in 1983 at the age of 24.  His remains returned to Alamogardo, where they are buried at the New Mexico Museum of Space History.  RIP little hairy spaceman.

We spent a couple of  hours at the aforementioned museum, which also is the serves as the International Space Hall of Fame. It was pretty interesting, had some great views over the basin, and we might have jumped at the opportunity to dress up a bit…We took this photo ourselves as we were all alone up there!

Our camp for the night was in town, but we didn’t venture out.  The next morning we headed off to the White Sands National Monument which was only about 16 miles away.  Given its proximity to the Missile Testing Range, about once a week the park road is closed for safety when they are testing.  

Brace yourselves for some physical geography facts:

This area used to be a shallow sea, which, when it retreated millions of years ago, left deep layers of gypsum, a soft mineral consisting of hydrated calcium sulphate. The mountains rose, taking the gypsum high. The water from the melting glaciers dissolved the mineral and washed it back into the basin, and rain and snow today does the same. With no outflow rivers, the water from the standing lakes evaporates, leaving the mineral in crystal form, selenite. The crystals are broken down by wind until they form a bright white sand. This gypsum sand is used in the fertiliser and building industries. Wall board, plaster of Paris, blackboard chalk and alabaster all owe their whiteness to it. In this basin the gypsum has formed the most spectacular and unworldly area of bright white dunes, protected from plunder by the National Parks Service as White Sands National Monument. 

We caught the tail end of a closure, and were first in line of the queue to get in.   The Sands are amazing with miles and miles of bright white dunes which are dotted with the occasional grasses and yucca trees.  There is plenty of wildlife here, but mainly small critters like spiders, moths, lizards and snakes.  Natural selection has hit fast-forward here as despite the dunes only being a few thousand years old, many of these animals have evolved to be very pale in colour. 

We parked up and set out on a designated loop trail. The info on the trailhead sign said that the 5km would take 3 hours because it was just up and down the dunes, following marker posts. So we didn’t do that and risked straying from the path to do our own 1 hour walk. The temperature was in the early 60 degs F and very pleasant.

This place must be unbearable in the heat of the summer, and getting lost, which would be very easy, could be quite dangerous. We didn’t see the bleached bones of any lost tourists or any wildlife, only plenty of lizard foot prints and a few fighter jets and helicopters doing military manoeuvres. We safely made it back to the carpark and had our picnic sat atop a dune, looking at the mountains. Not a bad lunch spot.

We rolled on across the plains of the basin and crossed another small mountain range to our next stop, Las Cruses. This is a sprawling desert town straddling the I-10 interstate. Named for some crosses erected to commemorate a band of travellers who were attacked and killed in this area in the 18th C, it is now a medium sized town, home to many who work in the nearby military facilities.  It has a couple of historic areas and our camp for the night was within a short walk of one of them, Mesilla. This had a cute little square and we found a cool locals bar for a drink then had an enormous plate of Mexican food each at a nearby restaurant.

Despite going out completely unprepared we managed to be entirely unaffected by a strange and unusual event than happened during our evening out. It rained. Really hard. After weeks and weeks of travelling through desert and battling dust and dry skin, the heavens opened and it poured. Happily we managed to get home between downpours and stayed completely dry.  This weather was the start of our exposure to the wintery storm that was to crash across the more northern and eastern states, bringing plenty of snow to those areas, but only a few hours of rain to us.  This continued the next day as we did a long day of driving to leave New Mexico and to our next state, Arizona. Pretty miserable conditions on the highway, but we plodded along and arrived at our next stop, the town of Tombstone, safely.

1st – 5th Dec

We left our roost in the Guadelupe Mountains in an ongoing cool brisk breeze but glorious sunshine.  Our mini convoy of two truck campers cruised the easy 40 miles over the ongoing desert plains dotted with oil wells, across the border into New Mexico and to the tourist-activity-of-the-day, a visit to the Carlsbad Caverns National Park.   We followed the tail of our new buddies up the hill to the visitors centre, parked up and set off on one the most spectacular 2 mile walks that I think I have ever done.

The Cavern complex was discovered in 1898 by a teenager called Jim White, who explored it with a homemade wire ladder and gonads bigger than mine. By 1923 it had been declared a National Park and visitors were descending the 230m into the caverns down a narrow switchback path, using rickety ladders and steps to get into the numerous rooms. By 1932 two elevator shafts had been sunk to link the main cavern room with the surface. Now it has a new visitor centre with shop and cafe at the top, 4 elevators, and a cafe underground.  You can get the elevator down, but there is now an amazing  path that winds down from the visitor centre into the mouth of the cavern, through numerous chambers and rooms into the Big Room, an enormous chamber 8.2 acres in size.  There are countless formations, fabulously lit, and the whole journey to, and around the Big Room is 2 miles long. It was stupendous. Epic. Photographs do it no justice at all.

The outer rooms are also home to another large population of Mexican Bats which put on a great show as they leave at dusk to feed. They, like the Austin bats that we did not see because they had already gone to Mexico for the winter, had already gone to Mexico for the winter. Don’t blame them either.

We surfaced by elevator and all had lunch in the cafe before saying our goodbyes to Val and Wayne, who were heading back to Colorado via a night in Roswell. We weren’t going that far. Our next stop was in a park north of Carlsbad for 3 nights, where we had arranged a mobile RV repair guy to come out to mend our water heater.  Carlsbad is not a pretty place. What was a small town servicing the caverns is now a large sprawling conurbation servicing an oil boom.  Most of the workers, who are predominantly single men, live in featureless dusty RV parks and the main strip was a collection of food joints, liquor stores and truck sales and service shops. I imagine this place is quite a harsh place to live. After a brief stop for provisions we escaped the town and headed 20 miles north to our camp for the next 3 nights. We had no plans to do anything for the next few days, so being out of town didn’t matter at all.  We quite successfully achieved our goal of nothingness with the addition of:

1) a 3 mile stroll down a track from the camp to a nearby reservoir. This was billed as a ‘nature trail to bird refuge’, but the reality was ‘dry, dusty, rutted track littered with beer bottles, plastic bags and spent shotgun cartridges leading to body of water with a couple of coots drifting around on it’. It was a bit optimistic to have taken the binoculars.

2) Three loads of laundry.

3) Getting a BBQ dinner from the camp kitchen. We had to not only order our meal in the morning, but also book a time slot for it to be prepared. We snagged the very latest slot available, which was 6.30pm. This is the land of the early dinner.

4) Getting the water heater fixed. Warren, the RV fixit guy came and after an hour of diagnostics, seemingly fixed it. He is now the 4th person to be involved with this blasted heater, but by far and away the most competent. We were disappointed the next day, when, as we prepared to leave Carlsbad area, it didn’t seem to be working fully. After a phone call he arranged for an assistant to drive another part out to us. I replaced this that evening, but to no effect. Our hearts were heavy with the prospect of having to arrange another person to come and look at it, and spending even more money on it, at some future point on our travels. But then we managed to magically fix it by……. flipping the fuse switch back into the ON position! Still not sure if this had tripped, or been left off by Warren, but who cares. Hot water is hot water. Hoorah!

Our next stop in ‘The Land of Enchantment’, as New Mexico is charmingly called, was Roswell. Alien City. Land of the little green men, the flying saucer, a plethora of naff gift shops and a whole heap of intrigue. It was a shortish drive through some fairly un-enchanting portions of New Mexico to this mythic town.  It is, on the face of it, a town like any other, with a few notable exceptions.

1. In July 1947 someone saw something odd, found some bits of something odd and reported it to the authorities.  The military, who had an enormous presence in the area at the time, became very interested and took over ‘investigations’.  What ever it was that  the military were up to and had manage to stuff up was frantically covered up and the ‘little green men/flying saucer’ rumours were theatrically ‘quashed’ to feed the appetite of the conspiracy theorists and draw attention away from the truth.  (That’s my opinion anyway.)
2. Roswell needs alien conspiracy theories.
3. Aliens are everywhere, especially the plastic/chainsaw sculpture/inflatable types.
4. My husband was very excited about coming here because he, and bizarrely also my mother, believe that they are aliens themselves. (Nuts, the pair of them).
5. In the visitors centre there are some friendly aliens that will pose for a photo for free. How friendly is that?

We came, we toured the museum, we had a burger lunch, we visited a very eclectic art gallery and we spent one night in a small RV park just out of town. The host was friendly here too.

26th Nov- 1st Dec

We cruised back to Alpine, stocked up on provisions and headed another 20 miles north to a town called Fort Davis. This sits in the foothills of the Davis mountains and is the closest town to the McDonald Observatory, one of the world’s foremost facilities in one of the world’s best dark skies regions.  We had booked tickets to one of the thrice weekly ‘Star Parties’ when the observatory hosts an educational evening, with use of some of its smaller telescopes. The observatory, allied to the University of Texas, has some massive telescopes one of which, at 11m in diameter is one of the largest in the world.

Massive telescope

Fort Davis itself, as the name might suggest, was originally a military camp in the second half of the 19th C, and is the highest town in Texas, at about 5000ft. It has an impressive court house and lots of original old buildings, around which one can do a walking tour and the old fort is a national historic monument.

We spent one day mooching around town on foot and bike, doing the tour, browsing gift shops and the historic ‘drug store’, and, on recommendation of the lady in the visitors centre, had a fabulous Mexican lunch at a very unprepossessing restaurant on the other side of town that was so low-key it might have been a military secret itself.

Actual secret mexican restaurant

The Star Party was the highlight of our time here. The observatory was a 17 mile drive up into the hills and having liberated Big Dave from TC and packed a picnic supper, we headed up in time for sunset.

 The back deck of Big D was a fine place for a mug of french onion soup and a cheese sandwich whilst we watched the sun go down and we spent an hour chatting to a fellow party-goer, Jack, whilst waiting for darkness.  It was a perfect evening for star gazing. Crystal clear, moonless, windless and relatively warm (apparently) and our modest numbers of 120 were far preferable to the 500-600 people crowds of the previous Thanksgiving week. The evening started in a circular amphitheatre dimly lit in red. Our host gave a very informative and entertaining hour-long presentation, pointing out stars, constellations, planets and distant galaxies with the most amazing laser pointer that seemed to reach all the way out into the universe. He blew our minds with facts and figures of size, distance and time and despite the dropping temperatures, we didn’t want it to end.  The second half of the evening involved being able to peer into each of the five small telescopes that they had set up, both mobile and in small observatories. All in all it was epic and now (well, this week) we both want to be astronomers.

The next day we took advantage of an unfettered Big D and drove 20 miles to the next town of Marfa.  This might be known to some as the location of the 1956 movie Giant staring Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Rock Hudson and Dennis Hopper, but nowadays its identity is closely allied to its art community.  In 1971 the minimalist artist Donald Judd came to town and eventually bought another old army base to create an artist retreat and location for his massive permanent art installations.

Hampson being serious in the presence of an art installation

 One of these is a field containing numerous massive concrete boxes, and the other comprises of countless aluminium boxes housed in two massive artillery sheds.

Me, not being very serious

As with most modern art, our baseline was ‘skeptical and contemptuous’ but the aluminium boxes were impressive for their numbers, uniformity and setting.  Photos inside were not allowed unfortunately.

Building containing aluminium boxes, honest

After a very tasty cafe lunch we wandered around the town to discover that it was a bit soulless. Many of the galleries were shut and the the shops that we found open seemed to be catering to a type of wealthy tourist that wasn’t obviously in town today. Our last activity was visiting another massive permanent installation that was a series of semi-crushed car body parts welded together.  We weren’t convinced.  Unfortunately we didn’t hang around in Marfa long enough to witness its other curiosity, The Marfa Lights. These are unexplained twinkling lights that happen over the plains close to the town that are visible on many nights each year. There are lots of theories, but the car headlights likely explain most if not all of them.

Our next, and last, stop in Texas was the Guadelupe National Park.  This was   another beautiful drive through the plains of West Texas, back through Marfa and then north. There were a couple of curiosities along the way: an homage to the film Giant just north of Marfa,

and a cool border patrol radar blimp thing further up the road.

The Guadelupe Mountains rear up from the plains, headed by the sheer rock face of the peak El Capitain.  The tallest point in Texas, Guadelupe Peak, is also here and we planned to ‘knock the b*&%$#d off’ to quote a famed NZ mountaineer. Our camp was a ‘first-come-first-served’ carpark site without any services at the trailhead. There was plenty of space on our arrival and we found a corner spot with a view of the hills.

One of our nearby co-campers was another big Lance camper, a bit smaller than TC, sat upon a black truck very like Big Dave. Of course a conversation was struck up, how could we not! Val and Wayne, and their beautiful black lab, Jada, were from Colorado and we got on like a house on fire.  Due to the arrival of some very windy weather we couldn’t do the peak hike, but the next day they joined us, or we joined them, not sure, for a more sheltered 3 hour canyon hike up a dry river bed to ‘Devil’s Hall’.

Them

Us

Devil’s Hall

 

Later, although it was only 4.30pm, they came round for drinks. They left nearly 6 hours later after many beers, a bottle of wine, the significant portion of a very nice bottle of 16 yr old Lagavulin, a cobbled together meal and a game of scrabble. It was our first Tin Can entertaining evening and our first doggy visitation after Jada made herself at home on the sofa for the evening. She was at high risk of being dog-napped as we fell in love with her.

Our next stop was the Carlsbad Caverns, a short journey across the state border into New Mexico. Wayne and Val were headed the same way the next morning, so we went in a mini Lance camper convoy of two.

 

 

20th – 26th Nov

An 80 mile road from the small university town of Alpine runs down to the western entrance of Big Bend National Park, and the settlement of Terlingua. This is 80 sweeping miles of perfect black-top through the astounding beauty of the Chihauhuan Desert, an arid landscape home to a few vast ranches set amongst scrubby flora, scattered RV/shed dwellings and countless packs of wild chihuahuas…..probably. After the humidity of Eastern Texas, the dry air of West Texas was a welcome change, although it left me with skin hydration towards the ‘lizard’ end of the spectrum and a particularly irritating dry cough. Nothing that moisturiser and cold beer couldn’t try and solve…

Terlingua is an odd place to say the least.  The original mining town was established in the 1880s after cinnabar, the mercury ore, was discovered in the area. It boomed, then busted and was deserted in the 1940s, leaving a ghost town. It was slowly re-inhabited from the 1960s and now is a loose collection of ruins, renovated original buildings, RV/shed dwellings & small adobe homes. It has a small permanent population, a medium population of seasonal workers and drifters who stay awhile and is a popular tourist stop for visitors to the park. We arrived at one of the busiest times of the year, Thanksgiving week.  The weather is benign now and the Texans arrive in their hoards to spend time in this beautiful corner of the country.  We had six nights here and found space at a camp which combined RV sites, a motel, tent camping, shop, cafe and petrol station. We had no TV reception, no cell phone coverage, minimal wifi and coin operated showers. ‘Resort’ it was not, but the views were epic, sunset spectacular and we had plenty of space despite the crowds. Mexico is just across the Rio Grande river and modern American life is a long way away. It definitely felt like the end of the road and quite wild.

Big Bend National Park was just a  few miles down the road and it is a vast (bigger than the state of Rhode Island) and gorgeous swathe of desert with the impressive Chisos Mountains rising up in its centre. This area is a hiking mecca with countless trails and it is the reason most people make the journey here.  We did a great day hike up to the tallest point, Emory Peak. 2000ft of elevation and 10 miles round trip was enough to earn our picnic lunch and give us sore legs for the next few days. It was stunning. I have to admit, although Hampson would rather not, that we didn’t make it to the very top.

Nearly the top

The last 20 ft was a sheer rock face scramble up to a small plinth, already over-occupied by lots of fellow hikers who obviously had less fear than us.  The benefits of ‘summiting’ were outweighed by the risks of falling to our deaths and we were content to have nearly made it. Besides, we were starving and had sandwiches to eat.

The area is home to black bears and mountain lions, but despite keeping our eyes peeled, we saw none. That’s not to say, however, that we were not seen by them.  We got chatting to a couple on our way down who had been behind us as we were descending and they had watched a small black bear following us just off the trail for a a few minutes. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Our second outing into the park was a driving day. We took a gravel road 15 miles down to the Rio Grande and an impressive canyon called Santa Elena. The road was a bit bumpy, very ridged, and Big Dave, without the weight of TC is not a comfortable ride. His suspension is heavy duty and we arrived bone shaken and dusty. The gravel road was also lined by gnarly thorny bushes, and now the passenger side of Big D has a slightly less perfect paint job than previously. We have a date with a bottle of T-cut polish and some elbow grease at some time in the near future.

Mexico here                                        Hampsons                                    USA here

There was a short walk up into the canyon that involved wading across a small tributary of the river. It was a bit alien to us citizens of two island nations that a different country can be just a stone’s throw away. Literally, even with a pathetic girl throw. After the walk we decided that our dwindling fuel would get us back via the far more comfortable paved ‘long way round’ and we completed our loop drive home via a picnic lunch with a view.

Another thing that we did during our stay here was a rafting trip down the Rio Grande. This started with having to get up before dawn, a very painful thing for our lazy selves, and meeting at the shop to catch our up-river shuttle. The shop did a roaring sideline in selling coffees to the bleary eyed punters and by the time we were on the road we were nearly awake.  The road to the put-in wound its way along the river, through the other enormous park in this neck of the woods, Big Bend Ranch State Park. This road had been hailed as one of the USAs best drives and I can see why. Our rafting party was two boats, each with a guide, who did all the work of steering and paddling.

We had a very pleasant day watching the world go by as we drifted down river. The border is the deepest channel of the river as it was surveyed in 1880-something, so we spent the whole day in and out Mexico, re-entering the USA illegally. I think we got away with it though.

The river wound through a couple of canyons and down a few class 1&2 rapids. The danger levels were non-existent, the ‘wet-bottom’ factor was low to medium and our river-bank lunch in a sandy sun-trap was delicious. Our boat-mates were Jeff and Jen from Austin and it turns out that our recent stay in Austin had been in their neighbourhood. (Jen’s ‘wet-bottom’ factor was at about the level of her naval as she misjudged her raft dismount at the end of the day and found that 1880s deep channel.)

We had two meals out here. The first was very respectable steak at the quirky semi-subterranean local’s bar, La Kiva, on Thanksgiving. This place has a chequered history, most notably for the suspicious death of its proprietor, Glenn Felts in  2014. Another local, a rafting guide from the same company as we had used, stood trial for his murder, but was acquitted. In 2015, during the trial, National Geographic filmed a documentary series in the town called ‘Badlands, Texas’. Ostensibly the timing of the filming was a coincidence, and the coverage of the trial an afterthought, but the locals are sceptical. The documentary, rather than the murder, divided the community, and many believe the not-guilty verdict was flawed.

Our second dinner was a fantastic Mexican meal in a tiny family-run restaurant near our camp. We took advice from a chap at the next table who was a regular and had two amazing plates of food. I can’t remember what Nick had, but mine was beef in ‘red sauce’. No frills deliciousness.

On our last day we cycled the 5 miles from our camp up to the Ghost Town area. The road there was mostly uphill and it was a bit warm. Seeing as we had already visited this area in the car, our purpose was not really exploring but exercising and one of us might have enjoyed it more than the other. We had a good iced latte at the other end and the view was good. After a mooch around the old cemetery we headed home, but unfortunately the brisk headwind completely cancelled out the glory of the downhill run. Neither of us enjoyed that.

By the time we left Terlingua, so had nearly everyone else and we practically had our camp to ourselves for our last night before we headed back up the road to Alpine and its semi-civilisation. On the road, about 20 miles north of Terlingua is a US  border security post. This is mainly keeping an eye out for illegal Mexican interlopers, but the jovial chit-chat from the border patrol officers was thinly veiled sleuthing and our British accents, New Zealand home and Washington plates had us having to dig out our passports and visas to reassure them that we were legal.  Amazing how stress levels increase under scrutiny. I couldn’t even remember which airport we arrived at.

 

15th – 20th Nov

With slightly heavy hearts we extracted ourselves from our Austin oasis and continued west, further into Texas Hill Country and to our next stop, Fredericksburg.  The hills in question are very modest, but after the flatlands of eastern Texas they completely change the flavour of this vast state.  Texas is huge. It is, to be fair, not the largest state. That accolade goes to Alaska, which is more than twice it’s size, but let’s put that to one side as an incomprehensible vastness more like the moon. (Isn’t that right, McWillies?!) If Texas was a country, it would be the 40th largest in the world, being about the same land area as France.

The Hill Country felt a lot like South Australia: dry, scrubby and undulating, and the area around Fredericksburg is gathering vineyards at such a pace that it will be a Texan Barossa before you know it.  The town itself was originally settled by German immigrants and has lots of residual influences. There are strasse where there would normally be streets, wurst where sausages should be and there is a kirche in the marktplatz.  The town has one wide main street lined with businesses catering to mainly one type of customer: the ‘weekender’.  People come here from the cities in their hoards for this 48 hour excursion of eating, wine ‘tasting’ (in large quantities), and shopping (if they are in the market for leather goods, cowboy boots and hats, home decor items and general kitch).  It is land of the wedding, the hen weekend and the romantic getaway. It was charming, but the locals say it is being taken over by Californians who have moved in and turned all the smaller homes into Air B&Bs, catering to the tourists, but pushing out the young families. Such is the familiar story of progress.

Fredericksburg also has the highly renowned National Museum of the Pacific War full of WWII exhibits and an area outside with a recreated combat war zone. We were wandering the streets on Veterans Day to the soundtrack of a re-enactment: gunfire and shells, with a vintage P-51 Mustang fighter plane doing laps around the town and doing fly-overs of the museum. Tragically we learnt that the loud bang that we had heard a short while later was not another part of the show, but the plane crashing, killing both veteran pilot and 93 year old passenger. Very sad, but miraculously it went down in an apartment block car park in town, avoiding  anyone else.

Our camp was a lovely park about 1 mile out of town, so an easy walk or cycle to get around.  There was an nice ride out to the other side of town and a short hike up a hillock, called Cross Mountain, for obvious reasons. Good view from the top. We were again, the only people travelling by  bike.

Our 4 days in Fredericksburg was very serene, but slightly marred by snot and coughing. The cold snap had brought me a cold virus. This is the first winter we are having since 2015, and I have avoided getting sick for a few years. I guess you can’t dodge the bullets for ever. Hampson, however, despite being stuck in a small tin can with me and my affliction, has dodged it so far. I am taking note of his sympathy levels for future reference… We met some interesting park residents, including a couple who were off to NZ a few days later for a 6 week trip to see family. Earlier this year they had cycled 4400miles coast to coast, tent camping along the way. Now THAT is travelling (or madness. One or the other!)

From Fredericksburg we drove miles and miles through the unchanging landscape of West Texas to where the Hill Country comes to an end and the flats and oil fields begin again, at Fort Stockton. This was just an overnight stop for us on our way to Big Bend National park. The town is full of RV parks along the highway corridor but this is not a holiday destination. The vast majority of people here are either passing through or are oilfield workers. It seemed a strange place, but our park was lovely. It had a small cafe that was open from 5-7.30pm, and we couldn’t resist having our dinner there. It was perfect: catfish for me, deep fried steak (with a fried chicken style crispy coating) for Hampson, both served with overcooked green beans, mashed potato, gravy and a biscuit each. (Biscuit = savoury scone in this part of the world). True Texan fayre.

The next day we continued our ‘wilds of Texas’ drive down to the inland edge of this vast land, Big Bend National Park and our stop, Terlingua.