Day 21: Big Bend Park (and more on Day 20)

This is me having waded across the Rio Grande to stand in Mexico.  Turns out that the penalty for doing this is $5000 fine or a year in jail or both!   But nobody seemed to be paying any attention.  Bubba hired two vans and took many of us down to Big Bend.  We rode more than 250  miles in the vans but the trip was well worth it as John and I will almost certainly avoid Texas in the future and Big Bend is pretty spectacular.  The cactus are just starting to bloom as there has been rain the past two days and the rock formations are marvelous.

We are now in "goathead" territory and these little thorns are certainly a plague.  They are the tiny thorned seeds of the tumbleweed and we are finding them in our beds, in our shoes, on the floor of the tent and everywhere.  I walked my bike into the camp yesterday but should have carried it as I got a flat just rolling it along.  Apparently we will have three more days of this before the problem lessens.  Despite this, we are in one of the nicer camps thus far.  There is even a small outhouse in the tent area that turns out to have a flush toilet.  I am now sitting at a picnic table using my headlamp to type and attracting lots of bugs so won't go on.   Except to say that tomorrow's trip promises to be harrowing with very high temps in the nineties.  Only 54 miles however.

More on "losing it" :  The dog area is marked on maps of the campground but there are no signs denoting the boundaries.  The boys who set up the tents are young, sweet and very boyish.  They have 30 or so tents to do and the winds were howling yesterday.  I am sure they never noticed the loads of desiccated piles lying about.  Only fussy old Dereka would worry about such niceties.