Chinati Hot Springs Marfa

... much there and the marker thats placed has seen better days. It riddled with bullets holes and covered with graffiti. Still kinda cool to see.<br><br>The rest of the day is riding hard!! I was about to give up after about 700 miles but found myself on a stretch of highway with nothing for about a 100 miles so I headed reaching my goal of Van Horn Texas against my will.<br><br>I finally made it to my hotel at 1045pm. Just about 15 hours of riding!<br>

... didn't get back to the RV until midnight. Sylvia crawled up on the bed and we both went to sleep. We went to the twilight progam and the starlight program. I saw the Milky Way, the Swan Nebula, twin stars, the red giant! The red super giant was another star we saw. I saw a galaxy 3,000 light years away. I saw Saturn's biggest moon - Titan!

We went to Fort Davis, established in 1854. It is one of the nations best preseved frontier forts. We stopped at a snake place to see snakes. Mamaw did not come in. We went shopping. After that, we went to Marfia again and we saw more lights this time. The nights are darker here so I can see a lot more stars then back in Zanesville. I even saw the Milky Way!

... dry, lots of mesquite, but buttes and mesas and lots and lots of windmills, the new kind. Miles and miles of them. Goats and cattle. Oil wells. And then miles and miles and miles of nothing but shrubs. Today not too hot at all - about 84 with a breeze. Blue sky. Great bakery in Llano, and we really liked the town of Mason (we have pictures for the Mason family!) The grocery stores have definitely gone southwestern. Shelves and shelves of tortillas ...

... the San Francisco Street Bar &amp; Grill for dinner for what turned out to be pretty good grub. Dan had a veggie tortilla soup and steak and I had a stuffed Ruby Trout that we were both happy with before retiring to the RV. We just slept right in the Public Parking lot near the Cathedral Basillica of St. Francis of Assasi. We parked next to another RV in an amost empty lot. Tomorrow - we experience Santa Fe!

... everything was fine. I bought a new spare from a little tire shop as I pulled into Marfa. I explored a little, and then stepped into the Hotel Paisano, which was absolutely beautifully restored. They let me look at a few rooms, and even though I hadn't been driving very long, I decided to stay the night. I'm glad I did. Marfa is known for its burgeoning art scene, and there were quite a few cool young people walking around. It was a Monday, which is ...

... noticed a really bright star next to the thin crescent moon and contemplated whether that is why Texas is called the Lone Star State, but she was put to rights later by an elderly man who asked if we'd seen Venus tonight by the moon. It became apparent that the star was in fact Venus. The wise old man also told us about a comet that would become visible later as well. Yvonne's only thought was that wherever we had been in the world, we had always been able to spot Orion!

... it back in the early 1900s. And the most important part was that we managed to get out of the rain after driving through a massive downpour on the way there! The one thing we didn't see was the Marfa Lights, which are an apparently unexplained phenomenon of strange lights on the horizon at night which predate headlights, so that's not the explanation. Bizarre. But we were too tired to drive out to the viewing area so we missed them. Oh well.

... El Barzon, that started as a revolutionary group to hold onto homes that were being threatened to be reclaimed by the government after the debt crisis of 1994. There were stories of the people we met fighting police in the middle of the night, threatening to burn down their own houses, because they said if they weren't going to have the house, they were all going to burn inside with it. After the two weeks there, we went to the Sierra Tarahumara- a high altitude mountain ...

... rest area near Van Horn at 11:37 pm-long day and I covered a lot of territory. Not too interesting to write about but it was great to see-all unexplored territory to me, hoping to get back some day to see it at a more leisurely pace. I covered 522.7 miles. My art website and links to my artwanted portfolio http://home.earthlink.net/~greenvanartu sa/