Southwest Texas Road Trip
Southwest Texas Road Trip Time!
Is there anything better to experience travel wise than a long road trip? Or even a short road trip? Come to Southwest Texas for an adventure filled experience with us! Road trip days can have no agenda (or perhaps too much of an agenda!), the tunes get to be cranked up as you cruise the open road, and the wind ripping through your hair reminds you that YES you are alive. Southwest Texas…here we come!
I love road trips and I believe the USA is one of the best, if not the best, country in the world to road trip. Apologies to Iceland for a 2nd place finish. To experience and explore road trips both far from your home and very close to where you live makes the USA a special place to enjoy the open road.
I took a January road trip to Southwest Texas. It was after a work conference my partner Jill G had in San Antonio Texas that I tagged along on.
I want to share some highlights of this road trip in hopes that it will ignite excitement and energy in yourself. And get you planning a road trip of your own!
10 Southwest Texas Road Trip Highlights:
Total Days: 4
Total Mileage: 922.8 Miles Roundtrip.
Final Destination: Big Bend National Park.
Favorite stop along the way: Marathon, Texas.
Top Outdoor Adventure: Climbing to the top of Big Bend National Park via the Emory Peak Trail.
Biggest Surprise: The gentlemen who came in to the general store in the park and reported that he had just seen “one of the cats” out on a main trail during the middle of the day. When he said cat he actually meant mountain lion, the reclusive and rarely seen nocturnal animal!
Best Song on Road Trip Playlist: Sucker MC’s by Run DMC and Paul Revere by The Beastie Boys
New friend: The couple from South Carolina that we met at a gas station in the middle of nowhere that were headed to Sedona Arizona and were stopping in Big Bend and the Grand Canyon on the way!
Read: Under the Stars: How America Fell in Love with Camping by Dan White
I am on a quest to visit all 63 of the US National Parks. When Jill said that she had a work trip in San Antonio I made a request that we also did a road trip afterwards to Big Bend National Park.
It’s about a six hour drive from the city to the park but it’s the 2nd closest city to Big Bend (only El Paso by an hour) is closer. We were living in Ohio so we weren’t going to be getting much closer anytime sooner to Big Bend than this. It was our chance to go!
Big Bend National Park should honestly be mentioned in the same breath of Yosemite, Yellowstone, Glacier and the other “big boy” National Parks of America. It is that amazing, wide open, and diverse. It’s just a tad harder to get to (400 miles from any major city) therefore visitor totals are much lower than deserving of this magical place.
We hiked our butts off, saw amazing wildlife, and walked the border between the US and Mexico along the Rio Grande. We also connected with wonderful folks from all over the world, and had some random and fun road trip stops along the way in small towns, little nooks and crannies of rural Texas. Plus plenty of wide open views with not a building or human to be seen for hours!
If you make a trip to Southwest Texas and include Big Bend make sure you hit some of the following:
-The Santa Elena Canyon region on the Rio Grande.
-A day trip to Boquillas Canyon with a visit to our friends south of the border in Mexico, passport required!
-The star filled evenings in the Chisos Mountain Range.
-The Fossil Discovery Exhibit on the fringes of the park.
While we returned back to San Antonio due to our time constraints there are other great options to continue the road trip. Heading up to El Paso gives you the chance to visit this wonderful city, the Guadalupe Mountains, and Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico (where millions of bats fly out of the cave at dusk and you can witness during the evening “Bat Flight” program.) I did a road trip to these parks a different January year.
Read the article I wrote about this road trip adventure HERE!
If you open your eyes to what is around you the opportunities to discover the unexpected on a road trip are endless. Leave a little extra time in each day to not feel rushed and get to take in that unexpected finding.
Throw down any road trip questions in the comments on Big Bend/Texas and I’m happy to share more.
Thanks for reading!
Because Adventure Feeds the Soul,
Mike Rudd