King Ranch Tour, Kingsville, Texas

Hello all! I hope this finds y'all happy and healthy. For those of you who follow me on Facebook, this will be redundant, but there you are (you not only have the choice, but my permission to totally ignore all of this!)

When you grow up in Texas, you grow up absorbing the mystique and essence that is Texas. It’s what makes Texans so annoying to outsiders. We say, “It’s a Texas thing, y’all wouldn’t understand,” but you have to accept and understand that it is part and parcel of all of us. So, we quite literally grew up knowing about the King Ranch and believing that it is the biggest ranch in the world! That is not strictly true anymore, but the image remains. So, today we took advantage of our proximity to the King Ranch to take a ranch tour and to both Herb and I, the tour was certainly a highlight of our overall journey!

The iconic King Ranch, established in 1853 by Richard King, now encompasses 825,000 acres (larger than the State of Rhode Island) and is the largest ranch in Texas. It remains wholly owned by the descendants of Richard King and it is not just Texas history, it is a working cattle ranch, horse ranch, cotton farm, milo farm, and breeding ranch (both horses and cattle). It is all privately held land and the agribusiness now encompasses several states and several countries and at last count, was worth $1.1 billion!

As private property, no one can just wander through it. All tours are conducted via tour bus and you can’t get out and take pictures, so the pictures I took were all through the windows of the bus using my phone and its telephoto is piss-poor at a distance. A lot of those pictures are of such poor quality that I took the liberty of replacing the pictures with images from the internet.

More here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Ranch?wpro…Read more