Tuesday, December 19, 2000
Riviera, TX - Dec 19
Continuing our way across Texas, we made our first "repeat" stop at Seminole Canyon State Park, about 30 miles west of Del Rio. This is the park with the 4-6000-yr-old rock art in addition to a lovely secluded campground. We had "planned" a 4-night stay, but unfortunately our timing coincided with a 2-week "public hunt", so the park was only open to the public for Fri & Sat nights. The rest of the time it is full of crazed hunters taking care of the deer overpopulation. And why are there so many deer? Surprise! Because there are no natural predators. The sheep & goat ranchers have been busily eradicating the coyote & other predators from this area. In fact, this may be one of the few counties left in the US that still have a "bounty" on coyote. So you have a lovely remote camping area without the sounds of coyote howling at night. And we didn't see any deer either!We did enjoy seeing the rock art again. Because we were taking the tour on a weekend, our guide was a volunteer from the Texas Rock Art Institute, not of a park ranger. So it was very different from last year. Less attention to known scientific "fact" and more emphasis on personal interpretation. Quite interesting!
Our next stop was Carrizo Springs, motto "halfway between Del Rio & Laredo". We couldn't find much else to recommend it. There was a small WalMart & a decent grocery store.
We then spent 4 nights in Laredo. We stayed at Lake Casa Blanca Intl SP, located just across the road from the runways of the Greater Laredo Airport. We got one of three sites with elec hookups, which was a good thing, because we never saw the sun for the 4 days we were there. Based on the old cowboy song, Willie had always wanted to "walk the streets of Laredo", so that was the main reason for this stop. We did get to do this, but saw no cowboys, dead, alive or dying. It is very much the border town and not one of the nicer ones. It is growing rapidly because of NAFTA and will continue to do so. The SP already has the money for large-scale improvements to the campground, adding over 60 new elec sites (further from the runways!).
We did walk across the bridge into Nuevo Laredo, the Mexican "twin" city. It was quite an experience, with tourism down some because of the weather we were the only targets for large numbers of street vendors. About an hour of that was all we could take.
Laredo itself was a very friendly town to do practical things like mail Christmas packages & do shopping. It was incredible to see the postal clerks helping people interchangeably in Spanish or English without batting an eye. And there wasn't a surly one among them! Everywhere you went people were fluently bilinual -- quite impressive to us. We also managed to track down some of the elusive flu vaccine, so now we are both immunized.
Our final stop before reaching our winter destination is Riviera (pronounced ri-VEER-uh), where we are at a lovely rv park on the bay. The birdwatching is incredible & the days are warm & sunny. I think we can stand being in this area for a few months. The most exciting bird we have seen here is the Green Jay, a truly exotic bird.
# posted by Doug and Willie @ 8:18 AM 
