Big Bend 1

During the first few days in South West Texas, I spotted quite a number of abandoned stores.
A few miles from my hotel, I noticed an abandoned gas station. In general all the references the gas company are carefully removed. At this station,the clean up crew forgot to remove the star. I expect that this was Texaco gas station.




While I was driving from Houston to National Park Big Bend, the hills on the horizon got higher and higher. Once I’m inside the park the will turn into mountains. You might think the cactus in the photo is gigantic, but that is caused by the wonderful distortion from my wide-angle 10-22mm lens.


The secondary roads in this part of Texas are called Ranch to Market roads or just short Ranch Roads. Each ranch has a similar gate and usually the ranch buildings can’t be seen from the gate. In Europe people wonder why the US has relative liberal gun laws. Imagine it was only the early 20th century when there were only a few police officers in this area, for whom it took many days just to make a single inspection round. You needed a backup plan in this area, still today.


Finally the Big Bend. With more than 1250 sq miles, Big Bend is larger than Yosemite National Park, which makes Big Bend one of the largest National Parks. However it is the most remote, and least-visited national parks. In recent years only 300,000-350,000 visitors have entered the park annually.