The Arcon Inn Marfa

... 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!

... Julian. I went to the live show, which was held at the local bookstore, because there's not really another good place to host shows. (Until a new place opens, which is soon, I found out). The band, "Spectral Cities", was very cool, and I ended up meeting just about everyone there, all 15 or so. It was great to be in a little intimate atmosphere with a good band coming back from South By Southwest. One of the guys I met was an artist, who has worked on ...

It was a long haul across Texas, but I finally got to Big Bend National Park. West Texas is desert country much like Arizona and New Mexico. In fact, it is part of the Great Chihuahua Desert which extends well South into Mexico. The park is in the Southwest spur of Texas, along the Rio Grande River. This park is really out of the way with the closest big city (El Paso, TX) being over 200 miles away. In addition to being ...

... observatory has one of the largest telescopes in the world with a 432 inch diameter lense. Fort Davis - An adobe built fort that has dilapidated to the point that it's not worth the stop. The adjoining town is OK where the mainstay is the employees of the nearby McDonald Observatory and government workers. Rattlers & Reptiles Museum - Upon entering the exhibit the first thing we noticed was the amount of garbage lying around. Although there were several cages that ...

San Antonio marked an invisible dividing line on our road trip. Throughout our first month, the main focus had been on "visiting" things - visiting buildings, exhibitions, museums and all things cultural. Now, instead, the focus would shift to "viewing" things - admiring all of the natural beauty of the Western half of the USA. And what a landscape there is on the first leg of this scenic part of our tour. It is immediately breathtaking. Rolling hills covered in ...

In our continuing effort to avoid Hurricane Ike, we decided to stop for the night in a little town called Marfa in west Texas. Famous (well sort of) for its artists community and some 1980s artist named Donald Judd--who neither of us had ever heard of--it has a few nice hotels and a lot of art galleries and small cafes. When we arrived, we realized that this was a town with a strange vibe. Most of the buildings looked historic but not particularly ...

... are very far away. It is hard to be here and not believe that there are other life forms out there and one day, someone from here might actually find them. Next stop, SE New Mexico and a visit to White Sands and a friend in Taos. We are beginning to plan our trip a bit more as the price of fuel mounts. Trying to figure out how to see some wonderful places and visit some folks but not drive too far to do it. We will see.

... the drive to Fort Davis was extremely windy. Considering it was also the steepest part of the drive, the truck was working extra hard. The campsite was behind a motel. There was no internet. After I set up, I drove to the Observatory. About a half hour away with much more uphill. The tour lasted almost 4 hours, between the history of the various telescopes located there, to a brief overview of the ...

Our next leg was a long one on I-10 West from Austin to Fort Stockton before turning south to head to Big Bend. The only interesting sites were a very large wind farm surrounded by oil rigs pumping away and passing through LBJ's home town of Johnson City. Kudos to Zoe's father David for remembering about a wonderful barbecue place in Sonora. After some driving through back roads and a quick question to the locals, we came upon a hut ...