January 16, 2018

It has been a long time since i posted to the blog. In 2017 we toured Alaska, I will cover this trip in a future post but it was a fabulous trip.
This trip started 12-26-2017. We traveled to Santa Cruz, New Mexico to attend our Grandsons bar mitzvah. We spent a week there. I'll post pictures in my next post. From Santa Cruz we travel to the Maverick Ranch in Laitus, Texas. The Maverick Ranch RV park is part of the Laitus Golf Resort. We picked this park because it is on the road to Big Bend State ark ans 30 miles from Big Bend National Park.
This area is high desert country but there are alot of mountains. The mountains are very different in that some are volcanic, some are from the glaciers and others where formed by upheaval of the earths plates. The scenery is breath taking. We took three off road trips in Big Bend National Park. The first one was on the old ore road which took us 5 hours to 26 miles. The park ranger told us that due tothe monsoons last summer it was the most difficult road in the park. There were steps to climb with the jeep, lots of rocks and washouts. It was a lot of fun. We went with another couple who we camped next.
We also drove RT 170 which runs thru Big Bend State Park. It is listed as of of the best drives for geology  the country. It is a very hilly curvy road. We also visited the Traliga Ghost town, It is an old mining town where they mined cinnabar from which they got mercury. The mines are all closed now and have been closed with iron grates for safety. The mine in the ghost town was 7 miles long. T he cemetery in the cost town is nearly a hundred years old and you will see in the pictures they contain cairn graves. That is they are covered with rocks. People have left trinkes, bottles and coins at many of the graves.
They cemetery In Laitas is the same type.
Our next stop was the King Ranch in Kingsville, Texas. The total ranch covers 866,000 acres. We toured the ranch and the museum.  You can google the King Ranch to learn about it. We saw a number of wild animals on the bus tour.
From Kingsville it was a short derive to South Padre Island where we be until April 15th, The links to the pictures are listed below.

More when I get time.

Dick and Judy

Mayor of Laitus

Big Bend State Park RT 170

Terlingua Ghost town

Big Bend National Park

King Ranch