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Showing posts with label vacations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vacations. Show all posts

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Home away from home

Thought I'd drop you a few postcards from the road and let you see some of the beauty we're enjoying. This is the Big Bend area in West Texas...a spectacularly rugged part of our very large and diverse state.


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nationalgeographic.com

philly.com

Naturally, I'm writing all these "vacation posts" pre-vacation...so expect to see some of my own photos of the trip on Instagram.

Many of you know that I'm not really into roughing it. I'm more a "stop-the-(air-conditioined)car-and-let-me-get-a-shot-of that" kind of gal. And if you read a fairly recent post I did on tent camping, you'll know, too, that I want a real mattress, not an air mattress. To keep me from being cranky, my outdoor-loving daughter booked us a lovely suite at a recently restored 25-room historic hotel, which has captured all the charm of the Old West with some distinctly modern twists.


Historic exterior - Holland Hotel
thehollandhoteltexas.com

Restored exterior
thehollandhoteltexas.com

Historic lobby
thehollandhoteltexas.com

Restored lobby
thehollandhoteltexas.com

Restored dining room and patio
thehollandhoteltexas.com

Our accommodations
thehollandhoteltexas.com


For those of you who live in other parts of the world, here's a quick lesson on Texas geography that you might find interesting.


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Texas is roughly 10% larger than France and around twice as large as Germany or Japan, so the drive from Fort Worth to Big Bend country takes around 7.5 hours. Texas is quite geographically diverse, with coastal plains and marshes, grassy plains, pine and hardwood forests, blackland plains, rolling hills, plateaus and mountain ranges. On our trip, we'll travel through several distinctly different regions.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Back in the day: Tent camping

It's summertime, and the living is easy. At least that's what the song says. But it wasn't always that way.

Let me say right up front that my idea of roughing it is a Holiday Inn Express. I'd much rather be at a Ritz-Carlton. However, I grew up in a camping family in the 1950s, and I don't mean camping in one of those cute little trailers that everyone loves now.


Vintage postcard of a 1964 Mobile Scout at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas
tincantourists.com


No siree. My parents' idea of a great vacation was to pack all four of us, plus a ton of suitcases, folding lawn chairs, air mattresses, aluminum J. C. Higgins ice chests, a Coleman stove and a couple of lanterns, cast iron skillets and the biggest tent sold by Sears into the family Chevy and head out for parts unknown.

I looked for photos from those vacations, but I'm sure I got rid of them years ago to destroy all the evidence of what a bad sport I was, because I looked surly in every photo that was ever taken on one of those vacations. It's not that I was a pampered, ruffle-and-bows kind of girl. On the contrary, I was never happier than when I was riding horses or climbing trees. I just never liked smelling Off mosquito repellent, sleeping on the ground or getting campfire smoke in my eyes.

Other people apparently loved all those things though. But you never would have caught me on camera smiling like some of these crazy folks...no siree.


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