Travis and Michelle Fitzgerald's blog

I know it has been a while since we posted, but the past few weeks at work have been crazy. Luckily, we took the week of Thanksgiving off (with the exception of 2 hours Wednesday morning for me), and we've got some fun stuff to share! Expect several posts about our adventures.

The Saturday before Thanksgiving, Michelle and I headed out for some fall camping in West Texas. Normally, this is the time of year that I do the "guys camping trip" with my Dad, Uncle Denis, and cousin Austin. But since Austin is now in his first year at the University of Texas, and didn't get the whole week of Thanksgiving off, we postponed our trip until early January. So Michelle and I went to Big Bend instead.

For those of you not familiar with Big Bend, or West Texas, check out this map. The green blob on the left is Big Bend National Park, the yellow blob on the right is Houston:

As you can see, Big Bend National Park is large. It's about 775,000 acres. It took us about 1.5 hours to get from one side of the park to the other. It took us 10.5 driving hours to get from our house to our campsite. We're not kidding when we say Texas is big.

We stayed in Cottonwood Campground, which is a great primitive campsite facility in which generators are not allowed, and the view of the sky is awesome. It's near the Rio Grande River, so the climate is generally warmer than up in the mountains. Still, the lows at night were in the low 30s (Fahrenheit), so good sleeping bags are a must.

Here is our campsite:

Here is the view from our campsite. (Those cliffs are in Mexico.)

We did a couple of hikes. On Sunday we hiked the Window Trail (4 miles round trip) to get this awesome view of the desert below. On our way, we were told that a bear and her cubs were spotted recently in the area. But we didn't see them.

On Monday we hiked Santa Elena Canyon (1.7 miles round trip), and watched some French speaking folks throwing rocks at Mexico. The cliff on the left is in Mexico, on the right it is the U.S.

That there is the border. With a cliff like that, this part of the border doesn't need a wall built.

Just for the fun of it I took this panoramic picture of the canyon:

We drove back on Tuesday. We had a great time and are talking about what our next camping trip will be.

-Travis