Hey travelling-lovers!
I apologize for no posting for a long time, work kept me real busy. But here I am again, with a new post summarizing our journey in the United States. As some of you already know, I spent a year in Texas and since that time I have been totally in love with the USA, so I keep coming back every year. It has been almost 5 years now and every time I’m there, I do as much traveling as I can. I’ve already seen the West coast, the East coast, some of the South, so this time, I decided to explore the middle West. It was me, Vojta, my mom and her friend.
Our journey started in Texas. We flew from Prague to Austin, where my host family (which I spent the year) picked us up and we all drove to the beach in Port Aransas. There was 9 of us, so that was fun. We spent 3 nights there, and every night we went out for a delicious seafood dinner. Everyone got burned the first day, of course….
This is our beach house!:)
The second day we took a boat to get to the other little island, where we saw a huuuuge crab and some sea turtles!:)
Anyways, from the beach, we drove straight to San Antonio, where we spent an exhausting day mostly sightseeing. This is the old Alamo in the picture.
Then we finally got to Wimberley, a little town near Austin, where I lived. I got to ride one of the horses, like I used to.
The next day we made a trip to Hamilton Pool and saw a tarantula there! Just sitting there. On a leaf. Ugh.
We also visited Austin, where we did a first little bit of shopping and some sightseeing as well 🙂
And after spending a wonderful week with my American family, it was time to let this adventure begin! We were finally on the road, just the four of us. After about a 6-hour drive, we got to Big Bend, a national park on the border of Texas and Mexico. Since we were all well rested, we decided to do some serious hiking up to the mountains. The whole round trip took us more than 6 hours, but was totally worth it, the view from up there was just stunning. We did some more little ones as well.
This is the Santa Elena Canyon, that separates Mexico and Texas. So theoretically I was in Mexico. It’s necessary to say that the river was full of coral snakes and we crossed it without shoes. I would never do such a thing again. But I was in Mexico. Yay!
From there we drove up the north to New Mexico, where we visited the Carlsbad Caverns.
Actually, as I read, three Airbus planes would fit into the Big Room!
Then we visited White Sands National Monument. The desert looked like snow, that’s how white the sand was, and you could buy one of those green plastic things and go down the hill on it, we had a blast here. Oh and the black clothes in this weather? Fun.
After that, we went through Albuquerque, the biggest city of New Mexico, to Santa Fe, the capital. This city was way different than the others, all the buildings were made of dirt and looked really old. No skyscrapers, no cars, no shopping malls…
Anyways, after exploring the oldest capital in the States, we made another trip and on our way we saw this old Route 66 sign, so we stopped by and took pictures (omg my biceps looks huge in this one…:D)
The trip was to Pecos Natinal Historical Park, an old Spanish Mission Church.
As you can see, the weather couldn’t be more perfect. When we came back to Santa Fe, we did a little bit more of shopping and then got on our way to Shiprock. This cool rock formed by a collision of two tectonic plates, is a spot, which is located in 4 states at the same time – New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado, not because it is so large, but because there are 4 border corners of these states. Anyways, this was not a touristy place at all, so there were no people, no signs and even no road to the rock. We had to drive really slowly, there were big rocks everywhere, I still don’t get, how we didn’t break the car hahaha:)
The next stop on out road trip was Mesa Verde, where we could discover all the cliff palaces and buildings. Yes, they were built literally in the cliffs. This historic park is located in Colorado and was probably the only thing we saw in Colorado…
Soooo, how did you like it so far? Would you do the same trip?
Can you guess, what the next state we visited was? What did we see?
You’ll read in the next part of our journey! COMING SOON! STAY TUNED!
Love,
E.