This has been the summer of long drives, and since school starts on Monday, we decided to finish it off with, yep you guessed it-- one more long road trip, this time to Big Bend National Park. If you've never heard of Big Bend (I hadn't until we came to Texas), it's in the Chihuahuan Desert in far southwest Texas, about 650 miles from our house. This probably should be a picture-heavy post, but you'll see soon why it's not. We left at 4:15 yesterday morning. My modus operandi is to leave early and hope the kids sleep for a few hours before it gets light out. Three of the kids slept. Maren did not. You'll start to see a theme here...
We arrived at the park at around 2pm, and although it's in the desert, it was raining. As we drove west across Texas, the vegetation became much less lush, and the landscape a lot hillier. But the 80 or so mile drive from the freeway to the park didn't seem especially impressive, so I was surprised once we hit the mountains. The Chisos Basin region of the park is gorgeous. We had reservations in a cabin near the park lodge. When I made the reservation a few months ago, I opened the confirmation email to discover that they had accidentally charged me $1500 instead of $150 for a deposit for our two-night stay. I called back, and the guy who took the reservation laughed and said, "Yeah, there's no way anyone would pay $1500 to stay here."
Um, ok. Let's say our expectations weren't that high. We told the kids it would be kind of like camping, except we'd have beds.
When we arrived at the cabin, I was pleasantly surprised. It was built in the 1940s by the Civilian Conservation Corps and was adorable from the outside-- an adobe cottage with a stone porch overlooking the mountains and a tile roof. Inside it was pretty rustic, but still charming, with a stone floor, a raftered ceiling, and old photographs hanging on the walls.
We hiked for a while. Maren, who had a nasty cough and didn't really nap, screamed a lot, tried to walk in every puddle we passed, and attempted to throw herself off of mountains. Then we went to the lodge for dinner. Maren wouldn't sit AT ALL and had to be walked around the lodge for the entire meal to keep her quiet, which was necessary because the only people who eat dinner at 5pm are those with hungry kids and those who are over 75. We were the only ones in the dining room who didn't fit the latter category. After dinner, we returned to the cabin and got Isaac and Maren ready for bed. We put Maren in the crib and she screamed, so loud that we feared she was annoying our neighbors. So Eddie held her on his chest until she fell asleep.
The next hour or so was actually really nice. The boys were watching a movie on our 4-inch dvd player (no tv in wilderness cabins, folks), so Annie and I decided to take a walk. First we got some ice cream, then we took several of the hikes that Maren, in her cantankerous state, had prevented us from doing earlier. We returned just after sunset to find Maren and Isaac both sleeping peacefully. Annie and Bryce went to bed soon after.
Then Maren woke up. We brought her into bed with us, where instead of settling down again, she perked right up, laughing and talking and being simultaneously cute and annoying. She loved all of the "butterflies" (moths) in the room and kept trying to catch them. She demanded a drink and I got her one. Once she finished it, she started coughing and threw up all over our bed, her blanket, her pajamas and most of the towels the lodge had provided us. We cleaned up the bed as much as we could, put her back in the crib, turned off all the lights, and prayed the neighbors wouldn't complain as she screamed herself back to sleep. It was after 11 before she fell asleep.
Night fell. It got windy. The windows were open and the bathroom door kept blowing shut, then rattling loudly. The curtains kept blowing on our heads and creeping us out. It rained. I think Eddie and I probably slept five or six hours between us. When we woke up, it was still dark, but something was making noise. A LOT of noise. I finally put together that it wasn't one of the kids making noise, was not in fact anything human making noise, but thankfully it wasn't a bear either (our cooler was in the cabin with us and I was a little bit afraid of bears, cougars or javelinas going for our cinnamon bread and skim milk). It was a rodent of some sort. We never actually saw it, because we threw one of the (yep, pukey) towels over the garbage can and Eddie tossed it out the back door.
And hour or so later Isaac was eating breakfast when he said, "Mom, a mouse just ran in from under Annie and Bryce's bed." Sure enough, a very tame mouse was sitting in the middle of the bedroom floor, looking up at us, and more importantly, our food. We couldn't get it out and tried to coexist. After all, you're not supposed to kill anything inside of a National Park (I will admit to killing a bunch of mosquitos as I sat outside reading, but apparently not enough because my legs are filled with bits).
We set out to go hiking, this time right along the Rio Grande river. This part of the park was deserted, and when we got to the first hiking spot, there was a big sign posted that read "Thefts frequently occur in this parking lot." We looked across the river to the Mexican side and could see groups of people on horseback, and decided not to chance it. The next hiking spot was full of bugs. At the third we had to climb under a whole stand of prickery trees to get to the trail head. Maren screamed the whole time we hiked. Annie had a stomachache. It started to rain again.
Eddie and I looked at each other and decided not to stay a second night. We rushed back to the cottage, threw all of our stuff in the van, and set back for civilization. Apparently we're not good at roughing it.
I'm not sure if we'll surface for church tomorrow. We're all really, really tired (but Annie's stomach started to feel better as soon as she was sure she wouldn't have to sleep with rodents again). Maren is unbelievably cranky. I'm going to let the kids sleep in as long as they want and then we'll see how it goes. Monday is the first day of school-- the return to schedules and order, and after this vacation, I think we need a little bit of R&R.
