Remember how I said someone told us last night that the power would be back on in two hours? Yeah. That didn’t happen. In fact, the power didn’t come on until after we checked out today. Sooo we both had a pretty rough night and kind of a rough morning, too, as the power outage also meant there was neither hot water for showers nor any food available at the park restaurant today. Sheesh, guys! The other issue is that Big Bend was about eleventy billion degrees out today, and of course we were out in the hottest part of the day, so all that made things a bit challenging. However, we still managed to enjoy some truly beautiful things!

Here are our mountain friends from last night in the sunlight:

Here’s the view from a trail we took near the park lodge:

Here we are by the sign that we saw driving in last night:

Here are Mule Ears Peaks (one of my favorites of the day):

Here is Santa Elena Canyon:

We saw some horses cooling off in the muddy water there:

We even walked up to get a closer view of the canyon (and as I mentioned, it was hot hot hot, so this was quite an achievement):

We also saw this totally cute lizard:

… and some desert on our way out of the park:

Driving out towards Marathon, Texas, we saw some vultures perched on some posts along the road:

We’re back in Fort Stockton tonight at the charming Days Inn where we spent the night last week. (Seriously, it’s a really nice Days Inn.) We are going to sleep in air conditioning, take hot showers in the morning, and enjoy this free wireless internet!! We continue our journey east tomorrow!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 11:28 am and is filed under 2009 "Housing Optional" Tour.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.