Texas is called the bat state and, I assure you, that is so. Once we left Louisianna we drove all day to Potter Creek State Park, set up our camp and left immediately to find Bracken Cave and the 20 million Mexican free tailed bats that left it every night. The only catch was, no one knew where it was…not at the visitor’s center where we asked when we got into Texas, not on the Bat Conservancy website, which mentioned it, but did not give an address, and not in the convenience store where I asked when I thought we were near. The young woman I asked, did, however, call her father (can you see someone at WAWA doing that?) who told us we could not get near the cave, but could see them from such and such road. Well we went, found another couple there and did see a black ribbon appear in the sky way in the distance. Very unsatisfactory.
Two days later, in Austin, we did go on a BAT BOAT (for real) under the Commerce Street bridge and saw hundreds of thousands of bats come out at dusk. What a sight.
While waiting for the bat boat, and to escape the heat (I did say that it was hot here, right) we spent some time at a lovely arboretum with a park that simulated the dinosaur age. We also saw this great bug there.
We spent a lot of time in Texas contemplating LBJ, first at his ranch and then at his library. It was, for us, very different than visiting other presidential sites, this being the first one that was really in our lifetime. Below are the 4 stories of archives that are off-limits to the public.
We enjoyed seeing the ranch, as much because it was LBJ, as it gave us a good look at a real Texas ranch. As you can see, the road getting to it was unique.
San Antonio was lovely and the River Walk that everyone raves about lived up to its reputation. We also went to the Alamo, which is quite small and quite taken over by the whole city. We visited several other missions as well, getting a great sense of the Spanish influence over the indigenous population. However, it was very, very hot and that factored into the amount of time we spent.
The road from San Antonio to Austin was the ride from hell since there was NOTHING between the two cities and we were quite out of gas. David was silently making a contingency plan and I was trying, again to myself, to figure out who would hitch for gas and who would stay with the car. Luckily, by judicious coasting we managed, with ½ gallon to spare to coast up to a station and were glad to pay the $4.39 per gallon that we were charged.
Our campground was quite lovely and absolutely overrun with small white tailed deer who got quite close to the campsites in big herds.
We left to go to El Paso for the sole purpose of satisfying my need to dip a toe into Mexico. However, when we arrived at the absolutely ratty RV park we chose (because we were going to be there less that 12 hours) we were told by the RV park lady, the border guards and a waitress in a restaurant, that to go into Juarez was taking your life into your hands. We got there on Wednesday, and the day before there had been 8 drive by killings…406 since the new year. Drug wars. Needless to say, we changed our mind, and went to Huenco Tanks Park instead.
What a great place that park was. Not very well marked trails leading to 2000 year old petroglyphs hidden in caves. However, the directions to one of the caves said, “Go to the rock that looks like an alligator and follow its head to a small crack in the rocks. Then get on your belly and slither into the cave.” 
The huencos were impressions in the rocks that collected water for the indigenous Indians when they lived there because there was no other water source. We are now getting into some really beautiful country, dessert, scrub, rock peaks, wonderful blue sky.
Once again, our plans to spend a few hours at the park turned into an all day affair so our trip to New Mexico was delayed about a day.
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