Christmas in Texas

Tomorrow our Christmas interlude ends and we begin phase 2 of our U.S. Journey!  Here I am discovering the  wonders of the central park in the small German town of Fredricksberg just west of Austin.

Sand dunes, caves and big rocks: New Mexico to Texas

Tonight ends phase 1 of our journey, the Southwest.  We left Big Bend NP this morning after three days.  It rained most of last night and we were glad that we had backpacked and tent camped the previous night in good weather.  Tonight we enter the sort-of real world by driving to Fredericksburg, a lovely German heritage town west of Austin where we are staying at the LadyBird Johnson Municipal park.  We were able to eat classic German food outside under an oak tree that still had leaves on it and listen to a live country western group, all without freezing to death!  Tomorrow we will go on a brief shopping frenzy before having a long awaited rendesvous with our son, Kris, and his wife, Beth Ann.  Then we are off to Dirk's childhood home in Arlington to rendesvous with his parents, our kids, Rick and Jessica, Rick's girlfriend, Caitlin, and most of Dirk's family.  For being on the road it will be a family filled Christmas!

After we left Tucson, we headed for the White Sand Dunes Natl. Monument in New Mexico.  So beautiful but not enough time for a long hike there.

Took a ranger led sunset walk on the dunes and learned about these life giving yucca plants.

The sand is actually eroded from gypsum rocks, like the one in my left hand, in the nearby hills and blown into these dunes.  In one location it forms the crystals of gypsum like the one in my right hand, which also erode into sand.

Just a ways to the east is Carlsbad Caverns. This is the natural entrance through which the bats would emerge if they were not somewhere else hibernating.  There are disadvantages and advantages in traveling in December.  It was easy to get onto special tours and walks and easy to find a campsite, and look at the crowds!  This is a  1 hour hike straight down into the depths of the cavern 750 feet below the surface.

The publicly accessible Big Room at the bottom of the entrance trail was also accessible by elevator.  Very civilized trails and awesome!

Slightly more exciting was the special tour we took with a ranger where we descended first by rope, then by these special ladders, into the undeveloped Lower Cave. Good thing Dirk and I have lots of ladder experience! (ala West Coast Trail)

Hanging out in the Big Room of Carslbad.

Side trips between White Sands and Carlsbad Caverns included a night at a wonderful State Park called Oliver Lee Memorial and we hiked up the hill and got caught in a cloud.  Seems weird with all the prickly pear and ocotillo.

And we spent the evening on this party boat enjoying "Christmas on the Pecos."  Another night in Carlsbad we broke from camping mode and saw the latest Hobbit movie!

View from Dog Canyon after the cloud blew up the canyon.  Our RV is at the bottom of the gully and the White Sands are on the far side of the Tularosa basin below.

Then off to an obscure National Park, Guadalupe.  It is really only accessible by hiking.  This parking lot was actually the campground.  The views were amazing if you looked past the asphalt, and the moonlight was helpful since it got dark shortly after 5.

Our favorite hike was to Devil's Hall. The trail was through a classic southwestern wash, with great scrambling over the boulders.

Shortly before the hall was this rocky devil's amphitheater.

Here Dirk is in the Hall!

Switch scenes to a much bigger and wetter canyon:  Santa Elena Canyon where the Rio Grande cuts through into Big Bend National Park.  River rafters come through here, but perhaps not in winter. The Rio Grande was a surprise in that it was very small and very COLD!

Artsy picture of a surprise floating in the river.

Artsy picture of Dirk's windblown look.

Look closely at the end of the index finger and you will see that it is decorated with Prickly Pear spines. Dirk is still a desert gringo when it comes to cactus and has been stuck several times.  He even tried to pull these out with his mouth until he thought one was stuck in his tongue.  Then I gave him my pliers!

Went backpacking to the "South Rim" of the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend and caught this amazing sunset over the vast expanse of geologically tumultous desert.

Another fun hike in Big Bend, to "The Window" that looks out through two big walls over another huge vista of desert.  Yes, the hole does drop over a deadly precipice, but no, I was not in peril.

Dirk does a good job of keeping our windows clean so that they can catch views like this of him starting our backpack up those pinnacles in the reflection!

Big Bend is known for its birdwatching, and we enjoyed this acorn woodpecker on our riparian walk.

Rocks have been the theme of most of our southwestern journey, but these two were some of the finest.  If National Parks did not prohibit taking anything out of its setting I would have taken these two home and fried them up with some eggs!

Tonight we enjoyed the highly decorated Main Street of Fredricksberg.  How is this for a Texas Christmas display!

  Merry Christmas to  all our family and friends!

Birds, Bugs, Bobcats, and other Animals: Arizona

Dirk and I had a long visit with mom and Desi.  Mom sees bugs in the herbs in her food, the clips on paper, and the arrow on my computer screen.  Fortunately, she is blase about them.  Here we are comparing heights in the mirror.

These peach faced parrots have invaded Arizona and live in my mom's neighborhood now, although this shot was taken in downtown Scottsdale.

After our visit with mom we headed down to Tucson to visit my brother and his wife. They had a visitor in their yard, this beautiful bobcat!

Here it is in the dessert setting.  Later they had a much larger one:  the mother, they theorize.

Only my brother gets texts from his friends with pictures of dead raccoons.  This one had had its innerds eaten out, perhaps by a bobcat similar to above.  So we drove 20 minutes into the desert to retrieve its corpse from the friend's garbage can and cut off its tail. Now, how to skin it?????

Dirk and Rocky worked together dissecting away the skin and pulling the bones out of the tail, a process that took much longer than the cavalier instructions printed online.  End result, one coon skin tail stuffed with salt instead of bones, now curing in a ziploc in our RV!  Future plans for tail are unclear.  Hat, anyone?

Or perhaps a new pants ornament?

Dixie's sister-in-law, Mercy,  hiding like a bug in their native Mexican December blooming flowers!

One of the many bugs in Rocky's bug collection:  this is a mama scorpion with many babies and a few crickets.

To our great delight, scorpions glow green when illuminated with a black light.  Aren't they so cute????

Part of a gang of hawks in the Raptors in Flight show at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum.  I am glad not to be their prey because they hunt in teams.....this one a team of 6......and tag team each other in pursuit of rabbits and such.  Here they cruised over our head by inches as they sought out little tidbits of food left by their trainers!

Dixie living life as a desert tortoise at the Arizona Desert Museum in Tucson.

Our minimally telephoto cameras do not do this sight justice......huge flocks of sandhill cranes coming in for a landing in a shallow pond that now hosts over 20,000 of em each night. What a racket!  We were able to camp right by the pond and listen to the seagull/frog- like calls all evening.

The Sandhill Cranes congregating at Whitewater Draw outside of Tombstone Arizona.  They feed at surrounding corn fields during the day and come back here at night.  By the time I woke up in the morning, all 20,000 of them were gone!