Small Texas Towns on the Way to Big Bend

A mural welcomes us to Munday, Texas.

We got off to a slow start Saturday and only made it as far as Wichita Falls, Texas, on our way to Big Bend National Park. Sunday we managed 155 miles from Wichita Falls to Abilene.

Part of the adventure is discovering small towns, and part is finding a place to sleep on the way. That is the biggest reason it has taken us a day and a half to go 155 miles.

We spent nights in Wichita Falls and Abilene. Those are big towns by our standards, and oddly perhaps, it can be harder to find quality cheap accommodations in bigger towns. Often those places are not in the best parts of town, and sometimes the motels are used for … things other than sleeping.

A new trend we found was charging a deposit when you rent the room. One place wanted $100 and another wanted $50, along with the price of the room. They said if I paid cash, I could get the deposit back in the morning if nothing was damaged.

I declined both offers. I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night.

We found a cheap place in Wichita Falls that didn't have a refrigerator. It was cold outside, so we left our cooler outside our door. It was fine in the morning. The room was not really warm, but otherwise fine.

Abilene has a plethora of murals and a lot of statues. One place had statues that were scenes from children’s books — like the Three Little Pigs, the Three Bears, and the Three Kittens — and some I had not heard of.

There was a lot to see and we kept exploring until it was too dark to take any more pictures. We started looking for a place to stay then. We were tired and that isn’t the best way to go about finding a motel for the night.

In Abilene we went for a budget chain motel on the Interstate. That was the first time we had been on an Interstate highway this trip. This one is a bit isolated with no restaurants around. Nice room though.

The best cheap hotels are in the small towns. They are usually owned by local people and the quality is just better. Some businesses take more pride in their product than others. Chains are cookie-cutter operations that often have the bare minimum of standards.

We will likely end up at a smaller town tonight. We have reservations at Big Bend, but since we don’t know where we will be when night falls, we have to find rooms as we go along.

Small towns

We came across the little town of Munday, Texas, named after a postmaster. We were going to pass it by, but we happened to see a mural from the highway and stopped to take a look. It has three or four blocks of downtown.

We were surprised to find a lot of murals and outdoor art in this town. For a town of 1100 people, it seemed to have a lot going on. We stopped at another small town, Haskins, that had murals and a cool-looking courthouse.

A lot of these towns sprang up with whatever was going on at the time. The arrival of the railroad, an outpost for the army, the oil boom. Some of them sprung up overnight and disappeared almost as quickly when their reason for existence faded away.

Some towns survived, and some are hanging on by a thread today. Some of those towns have murals and other interesting things to see. Some do not.

The Frontier Museum

The Frontier Museum in Abilene gives a great look into the history of the area. It has been a hostile land for many years from an environmental standpoint — hot dry summers, storms, snakes, make it dangerous even today. When the white settlers were arriving there was no medicine and no law. You were literally on your own and only the fittest survived.