As a first time visitor to the southwest of the United States, I find myself surprised all the time. Sometimes it is hard to believe that I am still in the same country where I was born and raised. Here are a few things we have ran across when driving through Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
In Austin, TX, my French Partner in Crime (FPIC) and I were walking around the city to see what was what when we saw large groups of people gathering on a bridge. We walked over to investigate and found that there were also people waiting in the river in kayaks and gathering on the banks of the river. What was everyone waiting for? We asked and we found out that everyone was hanging around to see the nightly
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| Congress St Bridge, Austin, TX |
occurrence where the 1.5 million bats that live under the bridge fly out for the night. We waited too, of course, and were thoroughly amazing when, right on schedule, 1.5 million bats began flying out from the bridge under us. It took a full ten minutes for them all to exit. Even after they had flown off, we could still see clouds of them off in the distance. It was a really unexpected, amazing sight, and the first time I have ever seen large groups of people waiting and watching in the opposite direction of a sunset.
When passing through New Mexico, we stopped at White Sands National Monument. I expected, with the name, that we would be seeing some white sand...what found was 275(!) square miles of white sand. It was amazing. The best part was when we ran into a couple and their pet camel. They live in the mountains around the sand dunes and liked to bring their camel down to play in the dunes about once a week. It is funny to stand in the middle of miles of white dunes and watch a camel lay down in the sand. I felt very far from home.
The difference between cactus and trees is that cactus do not give off shade. We drove around the campground next to Saguaro National Park, AZ about 6 times before realizing that there would be no getting away from the desert sun. We pitched our tent in record speed and left to find a place out of the 100 degree weather. We are not made for that kind of heat. Getting up early the next day was easy. No one ever tells you how loud the desert is in the morning. With an alarm clock of about 1804575 singing/screaming birds and other animals, we were able to get up, eat, pack and hike all before the heat of the day at 11am. After 11:00 we just took refuge in the visitor's center and learned about cactus while all the rangers told us we were lucky because it was cooler than usual for that time of year. Arizona is beautiful and I can't wait to see more of it, but if I lived there I would be dead after the first summer.
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| Hiked through Apache lands... |
In the Southwest we also...
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| Camped out in the City of Rocks... |
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Crossed through some areas where, for miles, the only things we saw were
ourselves and the dirt road we were driving on... |
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and witnessed both staged and real live(!) shoot-outs in Tombstone
and Tuscan Arizona. Yikes. |
That's all for today! More later.
-Laura
When passing through New Mexico, we stopped at White Sands National Monument. I expected, with the name, that we would be seeing some white sand...what found was 275(!) square miles of white sand. It was amazing. The best part was when we ran into a couple and their pet camel. They live in the mountains around the sand dunes and liked to bring their camel down to play in the dunes about once a week. It is funny to stand in the middle of miles of white dunes and watch a camel lay down in the sand. I felt very far from home.
The difference between cactus and trees is that cactus do not give off shade. We drove around the campground next to Saguaro National Park, AZ about 6 times before realizing that there would be no getting away from the desert sun. We pitched our tent in record speed and left to find a place out of the 100 degree weather. We are not made for that kind of heat. Getting up early the next day was easy. No one ever tells you how loud the desert is in the morning. With an alarm clock of about 1804575 singing/screaming birds and other animals, we were able to get up, eat, pack and hike all before the heat of the day at 11am. After 11:00 we just took refuge in the visitor's center and learned about cactus while all the rangers told us we were lucky because it was cooler than usual for that time of year. Arizona is beautiful and I can't wait to see more of it, but if I lived there I would be dead after the first summer.
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