May 10, 2010 – Day Three

Today I woke up with a warm body cuddled up close to me. I was so glad that Marianne was enjoying the trip! Once again I was wrong. Molly was sleeping on the pillow next to me and Coco was sleeping at my ankles. At least the dogs are showing their trip appreciation.

The KOA was next to a farm with all sorts of animals, and at daybreak when I got up to take them outside, they were bewildered by all the strange sounds and smells. It was early and desolate enough that I challenged myself to let the dogs run without their leashes. They did really well, an encouraging sign, we are bonding.

One of my chores when camping (as we know it) is to dump the waste water. This is a necessary evil. And this time it was more necessary and more evil than ever before. Why? Because the last time we went camping three weeks earlier, my pump that I use to empty my tanks at my home, broke. So we had some vintage sewage aboard that was in dire need of dumping. That’s another good thing about KOA’s, just about every site has a sewage dump hook-up. And thank heaven for the chemicals that prevent the stink from stinking!

We left at 10am this morning, headed away from the Interstate highways for the first time on a 200 mile trip south to Big Bend National Park, this country’s most remote national park.

It’s an extremely desolate trip only made exciting by a monster cross wind coming out of the West. And since this is West Texas, the dust obscured the highway at times, Towns are few and far between in this part of the country, so we were somewhat amazed when we saw what I at first thought was a flying saucer just north of Marfa TX. When we got closer the UFO turned out to be a large inflatable blimp. I then surmised that the Air Force was testing this device for hunting down illegal aliens (so it really may be a UFO hunter, since little men from outer space would technically be considered illegal aliens). When we got the local fuel stop/Subway sandwich shop in Marfa, it was swarming with Border Patrol agents. I guessed it there was a big bust going on, but it turned out to be the best place in town to get a quick lunch, and that’s why all the uniformed officers were there. I asked one of them about the blimp and he gave me the pat line, “It’s an Air Force weather balloon, we don’t have anything to do with it.” Yeah, right.

Seeing that 100 federal officers can’t be wrong, I not only fueled up but ordered a $5 foot long sandwich. My idea was to find a nice city park out of the wind and have lunch. We never found a park, but Marfa is the county seat and it has a glorious 1886 building at the end of its main street in the middle of a square that would do just fine. I set up a couple of camping chairs that almost blew away, and ate our sandwiches. I finally shot some photos of the building and main street.

Marfa is semi-famous. I was the location of the 1955 movie, Giant, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. It would be Mr. Dean’s last movie, released in 1956 after he died in his Porsche outside of Cholame CA on his way to a race in Monterey on September 30, 1955 – which just happens to be my fifth birthday. That’s why I remember all this trivia.

Marfa was also the site of the recent Coen brothers Academy Award winning film, No Country for Old Men. It also had an Air Force base that closed 40 years ago and was subsequently purchased by a famous New York artist who turned it into a sprawling art enclave, enticing many other New York artists to this corner of the country.

But the most unusual thing about Marfa is the mysterious Marfa lights. Over 130 years ago people began seeing lights on the horizon just south of town, thinking they were the campfire lights of the Apache Indians preparing to raid the town. And to this day they still baffle people what they are. Nevertheless, the town has built a beautiful building on the highway heading south to view this strange phenomenon. Believe it or not.

The west wind was getting stronger the further south we drove, and it almost obscured the last somewhat big town in these here parts, Alpine. We would have stopped to look at this town but the wind and the heat, by now over 100°, kept us, including the dogs, in our air-conditioned and thankfully big truck.

We made it as far as Study Butte, pronounced Stoo-dee Beaut, not study butt, as I was to unceremoniously discover. Don’t ask. This fork in the road is nothing more than a suburb of the Terlingua ghost town. And Terlingua is famous for only one thing these days, the world’s first and largest chili cook-off, drawing thousands of people to this end of the earth.

I had booked us into the local RV campround for two nights, which turned out to be nothing more than a large gravel-paved parking lot on the site of an old open pit mine. Throw in a few trees to make it attractive, not, and you have one ugly place to park. Add the 107° in the shade, but there was no shade, and you can see why there were only a handful of RV’s in a lot that could supposedly handle 130, thank you chili! Mad dogs and Englishmen in the noon day sun – add Germans to that.

We stopped in their local café, purchased a couple of ice cream cones and decided two nights here would be at least one too many. We elected to get a refund for the second night and stay inside Big Bend park instead. Let it be hereby known that that was Marianne’s idea.

But before we left this place I noticed that there were a couple next to us, each with their own laptop computer, trying to logon to the only WiFi for miles in any direction. She did it, but he couldn’t. Since I thought Marianne and I were the only people who traveled with two laptops (well, actually three), I thought I’d offer my assistance. I got him up and running in a minute or so, and he told me that they were traveling from Miami, their home, to Alaska a three month trip – most impressive. When I told them that we were going the opposite direction also for three months and one of our stops would be Florida and Key West, they said we’d love it. I sure hope they’re right.

We stayed holed up in our air-conditioned trailer watching the Weather Channel scare everyone with the killer tornadoes in Oklahoma, a good 500 miles north of us. At about 7:30pm when the temperature dropped down to a more respectable 101° we decide we needed to see the Terlingua ghost town. Well, there’s not too much to it, but it does have one very large gift store, which trapped us for a while. One the way out, I asked the cashier where a good place to eat was, and she said the bar next door had a Monday night special – two hamburgers for the price of one, which we thought was a great idea. Unfortunately the place wasn’t air-conditioned, and although it had its share of extremely colorful characters, eating hamburgers in a hot hell hole is horrible.

But on the way into the ghost town we saw another café which looked like it should have air-conditioning. It did, and we got to underneath the only window air-conditioner in the place. Well, we had our choice of seating since we were the only ones there. That should have scared me, and it usually does, but my stomach was concerned that my throat had been slit, since I hadn’t had anything to eat since the Subway.

The waitress was a rather large and friendly lady, and the cook looked like he had served in the military and decided to retire to a ghost town but needed to supplement his meager retirement earnings. Marianne and I both ordered the hamburger steak, me with corn and potato salad, she with Brussels sprouts and French fries – making it a more European dining experience. Well, lo and behold, the food was pretty good, but Marianne liked my potato salad better than her French fries, so I was short changed on my meal one of the few times in my life (this event will become yet another of my “Dear Diary” entries).

Two things stick in my mind about this café; one was that both the waitress and cook were smokers, and just sat down a few tables from us and enjoyed their cigibutts. The other was after we were sitting there a while, this woman enters the place and asks for a menu. While that in itself isn’t too strange, her thick German accent was. Since I’m a native, I ask her if she was German, no, she informed me, she was Swiss. Never mistake a Swiss for a German, they don’t like it, and will hold it against you for the rest of their lives.

But since we were the only ones there, and she had a hard time understanding the menu, my translation of a ghost town café menu into German/Swiss warmed her up to us a bit. She let us know that this was her second visit to the U.S. This time she flew into Denver, rented a car, drove to Nebraska to visit friends (yeah, that would be on the top of my list), and then headed south, ending up like us, just a few miles from the Rio Grande and the Mexican border, in a desolate café in a ghost town in the middle of nowhere. Where can you book a vacation like that? Would they even give refunds? And on top of it all, she had another month to go, heading to Harlingen TX, another garden spot (don’t ask, I’ve been there) and then hopefully ending up in Florida. She ordered her food to go – but where would she go?

We spent the night with the air-conditioner working overtime, glad that we only had driven only 200 miles today. But we were now over one thousand miles from home.