Sights around Terlingua, Texas

We enjoyed living in Terlingua for 8 days.  We found that we didn't have to always go into the national park to have adventures, because we had fun even in our tiny little town.  As you can imagine, Denisa especially enjoyed all the wildflowers in town.

We found that we could ride our bikes from our RV park all the way to the National Park.

We also found that this was a good place to watch the sunset.  We really like how the setting sun lights up the foot hills around us.

It was a picturesque ride home as we watched the changing skies all the way back to the motorhome!

With the beautiful skies, we couldn't pick just one sunset picture this time.

On Saturday we got rain almost all day.  It was a good time to wash all that laundry that had been filling up the hamper, and catch up on some blog writing.  There was an hour or so that the rain quit, so we took off on a walk around our edge of town.  Has Denisa mentioned that the wild flowers are spectacular this year?

We decided to try to climb the foothill that is closest to us, so Mark lead the way on this scramble hike.

This is the only time we have seen this kind of red spiny cactus, and it was even flowering!






Denisa found a comfortable place to sit while Mark did more rock scrambling up the mountain.  It was about this time that we heard the first thunder, and realized we needed to get to lower ground fast!  It was a scrambling sprint down the mountain and a run back to the motorhome before the rain drenched us!

The rain has changed our plans at times, but it has also blessed us in many ways.  Tucked all over this hillside, we kept finding these fern-like plants that looked vaguely familiar.  Then Denisa realized she had one of these at a child.  

It was called a resurrection plant.  Because when you bought it, it was all dried up and curled in a ball. . .





and when you put it in water it will "resurrect" into a beautiful fern again!

All over that mountain were ugly dry ferns that were just waiting for the moisture we have been enjoying, and they were resurrecting to life!  That's another one of His wonders that mystifies us!

We waited a day for the trails to dry out, and we decided to try our bike ride for a second time.  Some friendly neighbors in our park told us about some petroglyphs on the side of a mountain that we could get to on our bicycles.  It sounded like an adventure that we couldn't miss.  So the last morning we were in Terlingua, we got the motorhome all packed up.  Then we took out for our last adventure in Big Bend. 

We found that the road to the mountain got wetter and muddier with every curve.  We slogged through the mud on our bikes until they were caked with cement-like muck.  We finally admitted defeat and decided to turn back home.  Of course, that meant going back through all the mud again.

We found that the mud was so deep that it would hit your pedal as you tried to ride through.  This throws your balance off completely.  The only alternative to falling completely over is to put your foot down in the muck to save yourself.  This happened not once, but twice to Denisa.  She might be smiling in this picture, but sometimes laughing is the only thing that keeps you from crying.

It took us half an hour to clean the mud off our bikes enough to load them onto their rack.  Then it took the rest of the hour to clean Denisa's shoes.  Sometimes the sights around Terlingua aren't as pretty and successful as we would like!