Day 2: Avebury & train to Paris

On our second day in England, Neil and I woke up early and went on the most beautiful run in the Cotswolds. Cannot even tell you how many times I have daydreamed about that run since, it was absolutely magical and one of the very best parts of the trip for me. When we got back, Abigail was just starting to get going, so she walked down to the village to check it out while Neil & I got ready to go. 

The drive back towards London was so gorgeous! We kept an eye out for the chalk horses in Wiltshire and sure enough...

Just very very cool. 

We debated between going to Stonehenge and Avebury and ultimately decided on Avebury after talking to some British friends (we were a little tight on time this day and worried about tour times at Stonehenge, etc. I do wish we'd been able to go because we were SO close, but I really loved Avebury. We went to both when I was a teenager and I found the original rock where my sisters and I all posed in extreme grumpiness and sent a photo to my parents for old times' sake.  

Thankfully this teenager was not at all grumpy and feeling MUCH better! 

I love how you can just wander between the stones (and there's a village built through a solid half of it!). 

Lots of sheep grazing too and wandering through the stones, which made it all feel very lovely and pastoral and idyllic. 

Here's a shot of the circle going right up (and eventually through!) the village! 

Then we drove back to London, dropped off the car, breathed a sigh of relief about the whole "driving on the other side of the road" thing, and walked to Kings' Cross. The very nice Avis guy gave us such sweet tips about what bits of the city near us he thought we would like, but we didn't have time to check them out. Gosh, seriously everything I saw I wanted to just dig in and stay for weeks. I would really really really love to live in England at some point. 

Such a beautiful station! 

Had to detour on our way to the Eurostar.

Then we sat there forever because our train was delayed (but thankfully it was NOT cancelled as most of the others were, thanks to rail workers' strikes). So we finally got into Paris as the sun was setting...

We tried to get metro tickets but we went to the wrong machine and the lines were super long, so we ended up just walking to our AirBnB from Gare du Nord. I would...not do this again. I was tired and it was not a super nice part of the city so it was kind of stressful. 

But also PARIS. 

Then we found our AirBnB, figured out which one of the restaurants on my list was still open and seating diners (we ended up at Dame Tartine and yes the servers were truly as kind as the reviews say, definitely the perfect place to go on your first night). 

Escargot of course...

Then a bunch of tartines, sorry the picture is not rotated. Mine was the smoked salmon and radish one. 

Then the best creme brulee I have ever eaten in my entire life, hands down, no contest, truly amazing. We weren't even going to get dessert because we were pretty full and very tired but when we asked for the bill the waitress was truly shocked and told us we HAD to have dessert. She was not wrong. 

And then back to our AirBnb in Le Marais. Funny thing here...the walk to Dame Tartine felt SO long the first night, and then we passed it a million times afterwards and every time we passed it we were like "oh, almost home, super close now." 



Here is a very blurry photo I took out the window showing the charming little courtyard of our Airbnb, which I really loved. It was teeny tiny but absolutely perfect and the location was unbeatable. 

 

Big Bend day 1: Lost Mine & setting up camp

Our spring break started on Friday, so on Thursday after school/work we hit the road! We waved to the Gateway Arch as we drove past (we still need to get a sticker for that one; we visited it before we started buying stickers at every park and putting them on our car top carrier). 



A friend who had recently moved from northwest Texas warned us that we would see a lot of oilfields and blowing dust--he was so right! Thankfully when we got to Big Bend it was much more beautiful--we were honestly blown away with how incredibly beautiful the park was. It had snowed about six inches a couple of weeks before we got there and the desert was in full bloom.

We entered through the Persimmon Gap entrance and went right to the Fossil Discovery exhibit (did you know that Big Bend is a paleontological wonderland with over 90 dinosaur species found in the park, including a giant pterosaur?)

And giant crocodiles...

This area is designed as a sort of playground space but it was really hot so we didn't last long. 


So we hopped back in the car and headed for the Chisos Mountains in the center of the park, which are the remnants of a giant volcano that basically blew itself up and formed a nice little basin where most of the park lodging is now located. (Fun fact, the Chisos are the only range which is contained entirely within a national park.) 

And good heavens it was so beautiful (and about 20 degrees cooler than the desert area!) Honestly, this park is SO cool because you have desert, mountains, and river biospheres and it is just so cool to experience so many different ecosystems within one park. 

We set up camp and then headed up the Lost Mine Trail, which is one of the more popular hikes in the park and only has about 20 parking spots--the info I'd read said to either go very early or later in the afternoon. We were there about 4 PM and it was perfect, easy to find a parking spot and relatively cool. 

And this was SUCH a beautiful hike!! In the photo below you can kind of see the colors in the rock, but in real life they looked like a rainbow. (I dropped my phone a week before we left and really didn't want to buy a new one and was hoping my phone would get better, and while it did get somewhat better, the screen is still super wonky and I usually can't really see what I'm taking a photo of, so it's basically like I'm back to film). 

Everyone clambering around on some rocks at the end of the hike...

This is about halfway through, this is the first really good view you get when you cross over the saddle by Casa Grande and can see the valley spread out in front of you stretching all the way to the Rio Grande. 

And here's the view back behind you of the Chisos stretching out toward the Window (we did that hike a few days later and it was gorgeous!). 

A great little bunch of hikers after spending the last 20 hours in the car! 

More views from the top, you can see the Rio Grande in this picture so it's fun to see both the US and Mexico stretching out and away!

We sat here for quite awhile and ate our snacks while we enjoyed fiiiinally being out of the car. 

Jules even did some meditating when the other kids ran off to explore. 

And Abigail going up as high as she can!

A few more pics back in the Casa Grande saddle...

Gosh I just could not get enough of this area, so gorgeous looking down into the valleys on each side. 

And then it was back down and back to camp for tacos, which we gobbled down so fast! I need to remember to quadruple ingredients for the first day because we are always ravenous. 

But isn't this view so gorgeous?! This was what we saw every morning when we woke up, and at night it was SO gorgeous because the sky was really bright with a full moon (super bummer for stars) but the silver lining of no stars is that we had the most gorgeous clear-cut dark mountains against bright sky outline every night. 


And while this may not look like the most appetizing thing, I promise it is SO good. I love dump cakes for camping and this one is always our favorite. (2 eggs, devil's food cake mix, can of soda...I used Diet Coke this time, mix those together and pour over 2 cans of cherry pie filling, put 12 coals on bottom and 14 on top and bake for 20ish minutes.) 

 

Some (not all) of the sites had these awesome shelters and Neil made sure to book a site with both a shelter AND a bear box, which is basically the ultimate luxury. 



And here's everyone playing cards and eating cobbler our first night (we use regular dishes for all our camping stuff EXCEPT the after-dinner treats, because I truly hate washing all the dishes and then sitting around in the dark eating your treat and then having to wash dishes again. Just use paper bowls). 

Blue Springs manatees

After we left Savannah, we took (another) detour on our way to Miami so that we could see the manatees at Blue Springs State Park. Guess who else had the same idea, everyone in Florida. 

We waited about an hour to get into the park but (I think!) it was worth it! So so cool, there were over 600 manatees in the river the day we were there. At the very beginning (photo just above) we saw a couple of manatees and we were very excited and watched them FOREVER and then thought maybe we should walk a little further. 

And wowza there were so many manatees the closer to the springs we got!! (When it's not manatee migration season you can swim in this river and scuba into the cave where the springs come out.) 

Basically the manatees swim up the St Johns river in search of the warm water that bubbles up out of the spring (which is a couple hundred feet deep). 

We walked to the headwaters of the river and I LOVED the scenery along the walk. 

Felt like Jurassic Park. :-) 

And the manatees were incredible!! 

I seriously could not believe that we were seeing so many manatees so close (haha, then as always happens on trips like this, we had a really fun manatee incident in the Keys that was mind-blowingly awesome, but that deserves its own blog post). 

Just sooo many manatees. And so many babies swimming with their moms!

Look! Baby manatee!

Such a cool experience and absolutely worth a visit if you're in the area!