Travels WithJohn and Janice

Travel blog

Every trip we've shared since 2011—filter by where we went, when we traveled, or what we explored.

Showing 4 of 236 posts

A hoodoo in Palo Duro CanyonUnited States
3 min read2017

Dateline May 24, 2017, Santa Fe and Palo Duro Canyon

Heading east for home, we stopped in Santa Fe, the oldest state capital in the country, for a local lunch our friends Sandie and Skip had tipped us to, a walk by the old cathedral, and Native American singers in the square. Then it was on into the Texas panhandle and Palo Duro Canyon, the second-largest canyon in the United States, carved by a fork of the Red River. We gave it an afternoon and knew at once it deserved days. With the canyon behind us, we turned toward Little Rock.

#Santa Fe#Palo Duro Canyon#Cathedral Basilica
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The Guadalupe Mountains in west TexasUnited States
4 min read2017

Dateline May 17, 2017, West Texas and Hueco Tanks

The long road west across Texas took us past a Fredericksburg grown too touristy to keep us, through a windy night in Fort Stockton, and on to the Guadalupe Mountains, an ancient sea reef pushed up into the four highest peaks in the state. We watched the oil and gas country roll by, miles of new pipeline and drilling rigs, and reached Hueco Tanks near El Paso, a state park that is really a preserved historic site. There among its great granite hollows are pictographs left over ten thousand years, geometric designs and more than two hundred painted masks in the rock. We camped quietly at the foot of it and turned, at last, toward Sedona.

#West Texas#Hueco Tanks#Guadalupe Mountains
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The Alamo in San AntonioUnited States
4 min read2017

Dateline May 16, 2017, The Alamo and San Antonio

An afternoon in San Antonio took us first to the Alamo, smaller in person than a boyhood of Davy Crockett movies had led John to expect, and to the stirring story of fewer than two hundred men who held it to the last against Santa Anna. We read Colonel Travis's famous letter, ending Victory or Death, and we have kept it here in full. Then we crossed to the River Walk for lunch at the rowdy Dick's Last Resort, and the next morning played the Quarry, a beautiful course laid into an old rock quarry. Then we pointed the Roadtrek west.

#The Alamo#San Antonio#Travis Letter
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John and Janice in TexasUnited States
4 min read2017

Dateline May 15, 2017, The Presidential Libraries of Texas

The next leg of our Spring Fling was a two-day tour of the Texas presidential libraries. At the George W. Bush library in Dallas we walked through his Portraits of Courage paintings of wounded veterans and the sobering Nation Under Attack room, where Janice still keeps her old World Trade Center badge. We took in George H.W. Bush's library at Texas A&M, where John remembered meeting the man himself years before, and Lyndon Johnson's at the University of Texas, with his taped phone calls and a robot reciting his speeches. Whatever your politics, each one is a piece of history.

#Presidential Libraries#George W. Bush#George H.W. Bush
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