We drove through some fantastic mountains (yes, Texas has multiple mountains....).
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| highway running through Davis Mountains State Park |
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| Looking down onto Fort Davis National Historic Site |
First we hit Fort Davis National Historic Site, which was crowded and boiling hot. I was hoping it'd be a bit cooler but what can you expect in west Texas in August!
M and I poured over all of Fort Davis's newly upgraded exhibits. You can take the park ranger out of the park, but you can't take the park out of the ranger! My favorite part of the visit was the porch swing. Its been a very long time since I've relaxed on a porch swing. I spent my childhood on the porch swing of our beach house. The sound of the chains creaking, along with the seagulls and the drone of I-10, always lulled me into bliss. M could make me ultimately blissful if he could manage a porch swing at the house.
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| Fort Davis's most awesome porch swing |
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| blissfully enjoying the swing |
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| weird repetitive view of the officers quarters |
My OTHER favorite part of Fort Davis was the hospital. Getting to view all the horrid torturous medical equipment that was "state of the art" in the mid-1800s is fascinating to me, and nauseating to most other people.
After Fort Davis and a quick scenic drive up to Davis Mountains State Park, we drove down to Alpine to check into the cheapest motel Alpine has to offer. I've stayed in some amazingly cheap places, so my standards are pretty low. (There was the place that advertised "Meat Burgers", with "meat" meaning whatever they found along the road; the place where we barricaded the door at night to sleep because the locks didn't work well; and then there was the I-10 truck stop that dad insisted we could get a good nights' sleep in the van) This motel wasn't too bad. It had the basics... the 'ice machine' was an igloo in the check in area that the owner filled each morning with ice from the gas station across the street, the pool had been filled in with concrete and fenced off years before, etc...
M and I went looking for a place to have dinner before hitting the bar for some live music. We tried 3 places that said they were open only to find them closed... I Yelped them properly. The 4th place didn't have any vegan options and was too expensive to have a sub-par meal. We even tried a diner that Yelp warned was constantly out of regular menu items. And yes, they were out of the only thing I could eat... salad. So we finally found ourselves, hungry and grumpy, at McDonald's ordering salads behind some fairly vicious people who were lamenting the broken soda machine.
After a fantastic dinner of McD's salad, we headed to the Railroad Blues for some live music. Talk about a small town - the first person we saw when we walked in recognized M as "Copperhead Guy". M studied snakes in grad school, and worked closely with locals. The band, the Lonesome Heros, was fantastic and very friendly. We're now Facebook friends. :-)
We had a great time and I had too many apricot beers (Shout-out to Corree!).
The next morning we tried our hand with eating in Alpine one last time and hit the no-salad diner. Their waffles completely make up for the lack of any type of vegetable.
We took a different scenic route back up to Carlsbad....
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| Border Patrol Blimp... who knew?! M says they keep it tethered to the ground. It floats a few hundred feet up in the air, light up at night for all the illegals and smugs to see.... yay for tax dollars! |
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| Of course we had to hit the Marfa Prada! It was actually crowded with motorcyclists and other on-lookers |
All in all, it was a fun quick getaway.... we'll hit the aspen slopes of Ruidoso next time.
ps - Fort Davis's gardener must be amazing...
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| I have Rosemary envy... look at the size of this monster!!! |
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