Near the top of our always-growing “Hiking Bucket List,” the Granite Mountain Hotshots State Park memorializes 19 brave firefighters who gave their lives fighting Arizona’s Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30, 2013. The Memorial Park is located approximately 70 miles north of Phoenix in the Weaver Mountains, in a mountainous outcropping of granite boulders...
Our six weeks touring Texas was over and done, but the only way home to Arizona was through New Mexico. Our brief visits would take us through two iconic NM cities, Roswell and Silver City. Roswell is perhaps best known as the supposed site of the “Roswell Incident,” in which a USAF nuclear test surveillance balloon crashed into the nearby...
Lucky Charm’s next two Texas State Parks came complete with their very own official mascots: Bison at Caprock Canyons, and Longhorn Bulls at Palo Duro Canyon. The bison are the remnants of the Great Southern Plains Bison, of which there were more than 8 million at one time. When new railroads after the Civil War made the shipment of tanned bison hides...
Leaving the beach, we headed back to the trees, specifically the Sam Houston National Forest. Alligators notwithstanding, Huntsville State Park is a lovely place, and no, we did not see any actual alligators. (Word has it that they are very small anyway.) Huntsville SP has tree-studded, non-crowded hiking trails, including a 7.33-miler encircling the entire...
Corpus Christi, Texas, sits on the coast in the Gulf of Mexico, just waiting for wide-eyed desert rats like us to show up and fill our shriveled lungs with that moist sea air. It’s also the home of deceased singer-songwriter-fashion-designer-and-more Selena, one of the most influential Mexican-Americans of our time and the #1 best-selling female Latin...
The Lucky Charm’s route onward from Big Bend was “bordering” the U.S./Mexico line, inspiring today’s blog theme as we looped our way down to the south, heading to the Padre Island seashore. It is an interesting time to be in this part of the world, with the rhetoric about the building of Trump’s wall rising to a crescendo on both sides...
Big Bend National Park is the temporary home for droves of snow-and-cold weary RV owners, decamping for warmer temps during the winter. Basking in the sunshine while soaking in the river-side Historic Hot Springs is enough to make anyone forget the term “polar vortex”! But more about the hot springs later. It’s called Big Bend because it’s BIG …… bigger...
Leaving Hueco Tanks for the mountainous region of West Texas was like moving to a different house in your neighborhood … same terrain, same feeling, and yet totally different and exciting. Guadalupe Mountains National Park is one of the most remote and least visited. You can “walk the line” down the center of the highway for 20 minutes before anyone...
Ahhh Texas, you’re a beautiful state, but you sure do have a bad reputation. Anyone who has ever driven across the state with their eyes glazed over says three things: it’s big, it’s boring, and it’s empty! But alas, while this may be true in some case, there is also a lot of variety. Think you know Texas? Take...
The start of our six-week Texas Road Trip begins in Willcox, Arizona. Willcox has the singular distinction of being a national leader in cattle production. This guy was warily suspicious of my approach, apparently with good reason, since he is one of the survivors. Besides the local bovine culture, the real reason for this stop was to visit the 11,985-acre...