Big Bend!

I'm excited to share a little bit of Big Bend today. 

Times have been busy in Gainesville and as a result I have been neglecting the blog. It feels good to be back here and almost done reminiscing about the big trip.

Our travels took us up to Canada and then down to this spot on the edge of Texas, on the border of Mexico. On our way there, we stopped in a couple of small towns we liked even more than Marfa - Marathon and Alpine.

Big Bend is huge and hot. A distant mountain range, clumps of cacti, peach rock jutting out, dusty trails. 

One of my goals of the whole trip was to soak in a hot spring. I had a chance here - we found a tiny hot spring off the brown, rapidly moving Rio Grande (above and below). 

We could see Mexico right across the Rio Grande!

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We spotted a three legged horse wandering on his own way off in the distance on the Mexico side.

There was a golden glow to everything as we enjoyed the view by sunset.

My dad told me he wondered what we would think of this Texas National Park after visiting all of these other grand places. He thought maybe we'd be a little unimpressed. It's true - the beauty was different here with its wide open desert of brown gravel and shrubs and large, rowdy river. It was more familiar to us, there was a sense of isolation to it, and it did not inspire those gasps of wonder that places like Big Sur did. Yet, we were far from unimpressed. There is such beauty in this place - a beauty of solitude and expansiveness.