Today we left the Walmart of Del Rio and drove to the visitor center for Amistad National Recreation Area.  Amistad Reservoir has nothing to do with the ship Amistad, rather the reservoir was named Amistad, which means “friendship” in Spanish.  The Amistad Dam backs up the Rio Grande river for over 80 miles, making Amistad Reservoir the 3rd largest man-made lake spanning an international border in the world.  There’s a string of buoys in the reservoir indicating the border between the US and Mexico, which follows the pre-reservoir path of the Rio Grande:

The kids completed their Junior Ranger workbooks and received their badges and patches:

Leaving the visitor center, we used the dump station and filled up our fresh water.  It’s quite the milestone when we break open another box of sewer dumping gloves, in this case switching from latex to nitrile:

We had originally thought to continue on to Big Bend, but we found out there’s dispersed camping here so we decided to check it out.  We were not disappointed:

This is the first time for almost six months that we’ve had this kind of solitude in a dispersed camping location:

M set out to try to catch dinner:

I drove back out to the main road and followed it until it runs into the lake.  The lake level can fluctuate by 30 feet or more, so this road always ends in a different spot:

We like it here so much that we decided to hang out here for a few days.

See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.