Alpine, Texas

The above picture is Casa Grande at sunset, we just had to take one more picture of it Sunday evening before we left the park the next day. We are now north of the park in Alpine, Texas. Still in Big Bend country, however. Alpine has a wonderful museum on the history of this area at Sul Ross University. After spending the past week or so touring this part of Texas it was interesting to learn more about what we saw, and also what we did not get to see. North of Big Bend National Park is Big Bend Ranch Park. We took a drive Sunday through that park, it is quite a scenic drive with impressive vistas of the Rio Grand River. We found out yesterday in the Big Bend Museum that Big Bend State Ranch Park has twenty-nine sites of rock art done by the Native Americans. One such site, 17 feet in height, was duplicated by the museum. It was drawn in 6 different colors by the Native Indians. Hard to imagine how they created it, especially considering the height involved. I want to also mentioned that we are parked on a small section of a working ranch, herds of cattle can be seen over the fence from our rig in the evenings. I rather like the noises they make and prefer their lowing over the roar of planes, or motorcycles!  Below is a picture of the field in front of our rig.

 This afternoon we experienced one of the curses of the desert; dust devils. It came up so quickly that I had no time to close the doors or windows and very rapidly the inside of our home was coated with dust. We saw another one a few days ago which was quite fascinating to watch as it whirled across a parking lot, around a building and over a fence. It very much looked like a whirling dervish or ghost twisting around in a cloud of dust. That one we enjoyed watching as we were not in its path! This may be my last posting for a few days. John and I are making a quick trip in our Honda to a nursing school reunion In Arizona. It killed me to do it, but we had to place KC in a boarding kennel again. He seems to get frailer with each passing day. Age is catching up with him!