We decided that it would be a big treat to stay at a hotel right at the air­port. I mean right at a ter­mi­nal. We’ve done this before in Hartford/Springfield and it was cool to check out and then wheel your lug­gage right over to air­line check-in.

The only one like that at Dallas/Ft. Worth is the Grand Hyatt and it is a step up from the one at Bradley Inter­na­tional. A BIG step up. The cost is quite a bit more and, well, every­thing is a bit more. Donna and I are fight­ing out of our weight class on this one. Like most first class hotels you have to pay for inter­net, this place has 3 lev­els of inter­net, $10, $15 & $25 a night; speedy to blaz­ing fast with a Net­flix log-in. There is a refrig­er­a­tor in the room, but it the hotel’s robotic mini bar, pull some­thing out and it is scanned and added to your bill. This means we can’t put any­thing of our own in it for fear of being charged when we take it back out.

The 3 restau­rants in the hotel were too nice for us to go in dressed in jeans and hik­ing boots, so we ordered room ser­vice. Soup and que­sadilla for Donna and a grilled chicken cae­sar salad for me for the equiv­a­lent of a tank of gas for the Pur­ple Whale. Tomor­row for break­fast we will be grab­bing some­thing in the terminal…maybe even from a DD.

But, we are in a room that is very spiffy, lit­er­ally leaps and bounds above the usual HIE places we stay. All the switches are thin mem­brane and there is a con­trol panel on each night­stand (which is really too ple­beian a word for this piece of fur­ni­ture) to con­trol all the lights, the room tem­per­a­ture and the shades for the floor to ceil­ing win­dow. The TV is a this year’s model 42″ Sam­sung. There is a tub or a glass walled shower to choose for your bathing needs. We both choose shower and it has one of those rain type heads that doesn’t have a water saver restric­tor plate in it. Nii­ice. The king bed is awe­some, I bet it is worth as much as Donna and I have spent on mat­tresses in our life­time. And hey, no cheap shrink-wrapped plas­tic cups, we have real fine glass­ware to drive our ice water from. I could get used to this, if I could only afford it all the time.

This morn­ing we all went for a cou­ple of short walks near the lodge as we were mark­ing time until Donna’s old­est brother Jim arrived. Jim was tak­ing a day off from work in Dal­las to come down and see everyone.

When he arrived we all piled into two cars and drove the 20 miles to the Rio Grande Vil­lage in the south­east part of the park. We had a pic­nic lunch and then took a short walk over to the boat ramp to actu­ally stare off at another coun­try, Mex­ico. Jim, myself, James and Madi­lyn tried to incite an inter­na­tional inci­dent by throw­ing rocks at the other side. The river is only about 25 yards wide here and though sev­eral of our group landed rocks in the Mex­i­can half of the river and I man­aged to strike land twice, no Fed­erales returned fire.

While we were eat­ing a road­run­ner made a brief appear­ance near us, but accu­rately judg­ing our max­i­mum fir­ing dis­tance, or he was watch­ing us throw stones at Mex­ico ear­lier, came no closer than 25 yards.

After our pic­nic we drove over to the Boquil­las Canyon Over­look to gaze again at the Rio Grande and from this height some of its flood plain. At the park­ing area there were a half dozen or so large rocks cov­ered in trin­kets made from beads, pieces of Fool’s Gold and painted walk­ing sticks in a sort of self-service Mex­i­can sou­venir stand. When we looked across the river, there were the artists and their horses sit­ting in the shade.

Prior to 9/11 there was an unof­fi­cial bor­der cross­ing here. The Mex­i­cans from the small iso­lated vil­lage of Boquil­las, not too far from the over­look, would row Amer­i­can park vis­i­tors to the other side to sell them these same type of items, before bring­ing them back across. Since then the cross­ing has been closed and Amer­i­cans are not allowed to cross the bor­der except via the offi­cial cross­ings a hun­dred miles east or west of here. I’m guess­ing there is a sort of under­stand­ing between the park rangers and the vil­lagers that as long as they are not actu­ally on Amer­i­can soil actively sell­ing these items it is OK. And they let the Mex­i­cans ride across the river in the morn­ing to set up “shop” and then back to col­lect their unsold wares and pro­ceeds each evening.

This break­fast waf­fle at the Micro­tel Inn wasn’t the usual round shape…

After eat­ing we spent the rest of the morn­ing over at San Angelo State park doing some geo­caching. There were a total of 56 caches in the park, but there was no way we would try and get nearly that many. Ended up grab­bing 8 and DNF­ing one. The park was touted as hav­ing a large lake, but because of the lack of rain in these parts it is bone dry. Maybe some­one should tell the state of Texas to amend their descrip­tion of the park. Also the geocache’s descrip­tions could be made more truth­ful. It was still worth the 4 bucks a head to get in as we got to see some prairie dogs (got a photo) and bison (no photo) to go with a cou­ple small hikes in some very dif­fer­ent ter­rain than we can see in SC.

The after­noon was spent dri­ving to Fort Stock­ton where we are spend­ing the night. Along the way we stopped and briefly vis­ited the Santa Rita #1 which turned the Uni­ver­sity of Texas into a very rich school when it became the first major dis­cov­ery of oil in West Texas. A cou­ple things we found out today, Texas isn’t big on post­cards, can’t seem to find them any­where and you can legally go 75 MPH on some of the 2 lane roads here.