Welcomed to Loma Paloma RV Park - Presidio, Texas

When we couldn't find a place to camp near Big Bend National Park during spring break, we headed an hour west where few spring breakers tread. We found Loma Paloma RV Park--a Passport America park that offered a good price. But even more importantly, they had plenty of spaces and encouraged us to just show up without reservations. They would welcome us any time to stay as long as we wanted. That was music to our ears after witnessing the mayhem of the spring break crowds at Big Bend National Park.

After meeting Lori and Kevin, the workampers that welcome new campers, we asked for advice on things to do while we were in the area. We found that we are just across the road from the Bishop Wetlands.

After settling the motor home into its full-hook-up site, we walked to this sanctuary for birds that are looking for a warm winter home. It looks like the birds here aren't used to visitors. They all flew before we could get close. So all of our bird pictures look like the one below, as they flew away from us.

This little bird felt so protected in his bush of thorns that he sat long enough for Denisa to finally take a picture.

This area also was home to a golf course. But the flood of 2008 closed the course, and it has not reopened. We saw that this par 1 hole was still in reasonable shape, and we were told that we were free to practice on some of the holes if we wanted.

Since we don't have any golf clubs, we just hiked through the old golf course, and up onto the levee that hopefully will prevent any future flooding.

An easy walk over the levee brought us to the Rio Grande, and the border of Mexico once again.

This little nature hike took us beside the desert cactus, like this fine example of a purple prickly pear . . .

and the tall gangly ocotillo that are only found in the Chihuahuan desert landscape.

Loma Paloma RV Park is a good place to stay while exploring Big Bend Ranch State Park. But since our flat tire at the national park, we've been a little paranoid about driving rough roads with our patched tire. We decided it was time to get a new set of tires, and the people at the campground recommended Rohana Auto Service in Presidio. This tire store was getting lots of business from park visitors, as our next door neighbor went there to get a tire patched, and another camper bought a new set of tires too. We stayed long enough that Rohana's could order the perfect tires for us, and mounted and balanced them when they arrived. We feel good knowing that the park ranger pickups use the same kind of tires that we now have.

Every Thursday afternoon, a group from the campground car pools to cross the border for some real Mexican food in Mexico. We got to ride in one of the pickups that has international insurance to make the drive to the nearby city in Mexico. We have always crossed the border in locations that have parking lots on the U.S. side so that we could leave our car parked and then walk into Mexico. This was our first experience of driving across the border.

This Thursday's dinner plan was to an upscale restaurant called El Mexico de Ayer, that sits on top of the hill over-looking the city. The restaurant name translates to "yesterday's Mexico" from Spanish. Does that mean they serve left-overs?

We had two pickup loads of people from Loma Paloma, and Denisa made them line up for a group photo before we went in.

It was the fanciest Mexico restaurant that we have ever experienced. We're more used to outdoor seating with the resident stray dogs sitting at our elbows. None of that here!

The menu was in Spanish, and the waiters spoke only Spanish. So we did a little google translate and some pointing and hoped that we had communicated what we really wanted to eat. Denisa's order turned out well. The menu said:

Google translated it as Grilled Shrimp with four flavors: dried chili, chiltepin (that's a pepper that is 40 times hotter than jalapeno), a la talla (grilled in garlic and pepper sauce), and lemon-garlic, accompanied by green salad and rice. Some of those shrimp were a little spicy!

Mark, on the other hand ordered:

He recognized the first words in the description as Chicken fajita. That sounds good, and everyone knows how to eat chicken fajitas. So when his dinner arrived at our table looking like this, he was a little confused!

Google translated his order as Chicken Molcajete: Chicken Fajita meat, chorizo sausage, roasted cactus, panela cheese, tail onion, bull-fighting chili, in tatemada sauce.

Tatemada sauce is charred salsa--a rich and smoky mixture of blistered chilis, tomatoes, onions, and garlic all combined in a mortar and pestle known as a molcajete. That heavy bowl made of volcanic stone is the molcajete, and it certainly holds in the heat. Five minutes after it arrived at our table, the liquid was still boiling inside! That's a hot Mexican meal! You can see the roasted cactus on top, with the charred chili peppers. This is authentic Mexican food.

While the rest of us were eating, Mark was still waiting for his meal to cool enough to take a bite.

The reason that most of the Loma Paloma regulars chose this restaurant was for the tasty margaritas. This restaurant also bottles up their own home-made tequila in empty liquor bottles to sell. Our group took its share of bottles home this evening.

As we left the restaurant, we saw that a shop across the street had varying sizes of molcajete for sale. That volcanic stone is heavy, so we won't be carrying one of those around in the motor home, even though we now have personal experience in their ability to keep things hot for a very long time

From our perch on the hill, Denisa took a picture of the city of Ojinaga, Mexico. It's much bigger than most of the little Mexican villages we have visited in the past. While it looks quite prosperous in the distance . . .

we see a different view when we look straight down at the detail of the buildings right below the restaurant.

Between getting new tires and some changes to the weather, our five-day stay stretched to a week. The long-term residents at the campground get together every day at 4:00 to share snacks and swap stories. We enjoyed visiting with the regulars, as well as the stream of transient campers like us that were just passing through. We got to know some of the people that stay here for the entire winter. Gary brings his dune buggy to the desert all the way from Illinois every winter.

We were glad that we had a good phone signal since we stayed for a week. That means that we could face-time with some really cute grandbabies.

We had temperatures in the 90s, so we wore shorts and short-sleeves and ran the air-conditioner every day. It was so hot that the ladies doing puzzles in the rec room picked out this winter bird scene hoping that it  would cool them down to look at the snow. 

We were still hiding out from the spring break crowd on St. Patrick's Day. Because we had such a good phone signal, we could stream the St. Patrick's Day parade all the way from Dublin, Ireland. Thousands of people come to one of the most famous Irish parades in the world. We were watching because we knew one of the people marching in the parade in the Owasso, Oklahoma band.

Our niece, Megan, is the drum major on the left in the Owasso High School band. These students spent their spring break in Ireland competing in the St. Patrick's Day band contest. They were named the best youth (high school) band in the very large competition. Yay!

Besides watching the parade, we celebrated St. Patrick's Day by wearing green and joining the other campers from Loma Paloma RV Park for a pot luck brunch. That snow-scene puzzle worked it's magic. Two days ago we were sweating in temperatures in the 90s, and this day the highs were in the 40s! The pot luck was moved indoors to the old golf club house because of the unusually cold temperature.

Besides the drop in temperature, we also had 24 hours of light rain. This desert gets an average of ten inches of rain per year, and we got close to a tenth of that in one day. While our precipitation at Loma Paloma campground was all rain, in the mountains of the state park beside us it was snowing. They got 3-4 inches of snow in the higher elevations, a very unusual occurrence this far south and this time of year. 

We went from running the air-conditioner and sweating, to wearing coats and gloves and turning on the heater here at Loma Paloma RV Park. It was a week in a new part of this very big state of Texas for us. The residents here included us in their events and we appreciated the warm welcome and the big sunsets here in the desert near Presidio at Loma Paloma RV Park.