I loved San Antonio. I want to go back; not nearly enough time. There are missions there, five I think. They are connected by a walking/bike trail. We didn’t have time to walk from one to the other, so we just visited one, Mission San Jose. Beautiful! Fascinating history.
We had lunch on the River Walk at a restaurant called Boudros. Yum! We ordered guacamole that the waiter prepared at our table. Best guacamole I’ve ever had. I was excited to see the River Walk, but it far exceeded my expectations. It is such a narrow river. The sidewalks and shops are right up against it’s banks. The landscaping is magnificent.
From San Antonio, we moved on to Seminole Canyon State Park in Comstock, Texas. You can hike above the canyon there, but visitors are not allowed to go into the canyon without a guide. We purchased tickets for a half day hiking tour for the morning after we arrived. After Christine purchased the non-refundable tickets, I read a review of the tour. The tour was rated as “difficult.” The reviewer said that there was a lot of scrambling over boulders (what does that even mean?) and that if you couldn’t keep up, they would leave you there and call the border patrol (the park was right on the border) and you’d have to wait for them to come get you which could take hours. What? We (with a big push from me) decided not to go.
Instead, we joined a 1.5 hour hiking tour led by a father and son duo, Lance and William, called the Fate Bell tour. It took you into the Fate Bell rock shelter. Lance explained to us that indigenous peoples lived there for thousands (they think something like up to 10,000!) of years, and left extraordinary pictographs. Fate Bell is sheltered, so the enormous amount of pictographs are extraordinarily well preserved. In addition, there were fossils in the rocks everywhere.
Lance, the father, had so much passion and enthusiasm for this place. William explained to me that Lance had been a tour guide here for longer than William had been alive. William was equally enthusiastic. They were seriously adorable.
At one point Lance prompted William to talk about an overhang we all looked up at. It was full of fossils. William took extreme delight in telling us that were looking up at rock that had once been below the sea.
I was awestruck by the pictographs. We pondered what these pictures meant. What were these people trying to convey? Were they creating these to communicate something to each other, or were they trying to communicate to us? Lance and William said over and over “We just don’t know.”
Below the visitor center there, on the descent into canyon, there is a sculpture called “Maker of Peace.” It depicts a shaman and was inspired by a pictograph. It took my breath away.
One day we took an eight mile or so hike along the canyon edge. Magnificent.
My photos don’t do it justice.
As I mentioned, the park is right on the border. Our hike took us to the Rio Grande River, the border between the US and Mexico. We will continue to be hugging the border as we move toward New Mexico, and while we are in New Mexico. Being close to the border like this gets me thinking about us humans, the way we think we own stuff, like land and countries, the way we claim things as are own, the way we exclude others from what we think is ours. I wonder what nature thinks about our perspective.
I love traveling because places like Seminole expand my mind. I love traveling because I meet enthusiastic, passionate people like Lance and William. So grateful for this opportunity.
