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I’ve been delinquent on the blog … Big Bend National Park, located in the southwest corner of Texas, spans 1,252 square miles. Its topography is varied enough to offer desert hikes, river hikes, and mountain hikes. This post will just be a (mercifully brief) collection of landscape photos, because all we did, for three days, was go on hikes.
Next, possibly this week: Marfa, TX.
This post is very much out of order—I’m weeks behind on the blog and jumping ahead—but I feel compelled to write. Today we visited the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, CA. It’s fun …
… but with tickets costing $44.95 for adults and $29.95 for children, how is this an affordable outing for anyone?
After San Antonio, we set out for Big Bend National Park.
Eventually we came to the Pecos River. We were pretty close to the Mexican border, and there wasn’t much to see in any direction. A cross on a hill just above the highway suggests that some traveler never reached his or her destination.
Next: Big Bend National Park
Welcome to Texas.
We visited Dallas and Austin to see family and friends, so no photos from those spots; but San Antonio was something else. It was much more of a pleasant city than I expected, insofar as it wasn’t overly built up like Dallas, and the architecture reminded me of eastern cities (I’m provincial that way). It also has a fantastic river walk that leads to the site of a former brewery, which now contains multiple funky shops and restaurants.
Of course, it is still the south in some respects.
The big attraction of San Antonio, of course, is the Alamo, which is downtown, the city having filled in all the space around it. The original Alamo complex was much larger than the small fort we see today (and the iconic façade was the fort’s church), which explains why the battle took as long as it did.
So here are some fun facts about the Alamo. First, a lot of the items in the Alamo Museum collection—papers, weapons, other metal goods—were donated by the musician Phil Collins, who has been obsessed with the Alamo ever since he watched the Disney series Davy Crockett as a child. Second, when the guide told us the story of the Alamo, he cited an eyewitness account of the battle given by “Joe,” servant to Commander William Travis. However, General Santa Ana had given the order to give no quarter to the men of the fort. So why did Joe survive? Because Santa Ana spared the women, children, and slaves. One of the unmentioned causes of the Texans’ revolt against Santa Ana was that the Mexican government wanted to ban slavery in the state of Texas, and the Texans weren’t having it.
Next: more Texas.
Next: San Antonio.
Finally, it was time to leave New Orleans and go to Texas, but first we stopped at the Tabasco plant on Avery Island, which is not an actual island, but a 2,200 acre site elevated above the surrounding marshes. (Avery Island contains a rock salt deposit “thought to be deeper than Mount Everest is high,” according to the Explore Louisiana website.) Tabasco sauce was created by Edmund McIlhenny, a Southern banker whose career was destroyed by the Civil War and who turned to making hot sauce as a way of making a living enlivening southern cuisine. Of course, the story of Tabasco sauce’s origin has been romanticized and is also disputed; it’s entirely likely that McIlhenny took an acquaintance’s recipe and bottled it as his own.
Whatever the story, the company branched out over the years, and there are 12 varieties of Tabasco sauce on the market at present, from the “family reserve” and a raspberry chipotle to “Scorpion Sauce,” which ranks 50,000 on the Scoville scale. (Regular Tabasco sauce falls between 2,500 and 5,000 on the scale; the actual Tabasco pepper itself falls between 30,000 and 50,000, while Habaneros start at 150,000 Scoville units.)
Next: still toward Texas.