Photo above is a selfie with the moon. Honestly, I have no idea what’s going on except a moment of weirdness.
Sunday, December 2 : Jill flies to Monahans, Texas, to visit her Mom.
Sunday, December 9 : Ray flies to Monahans.
Thursday, December 13 : Ray’s daughter, Terre, and granddaughter, Attie Blu drive from Austin, Texas, to pick up Ray & Jill to drive to Alpine, Texas, to relive some stories from the 1970’s.
Sunday, December 16 : everyone drives to Austin.
Wednesday, December 19 : Ray & Jill fly back to Newark.
A note to start : Ray lived in Louisiana for 18 years. He suspects he never saw more than 12 deer in all those years. As best anyone can tell, there are lots of deer in Louisiana.
Monahans
For the first week, Ray & Jill would wire up their Earbuds and walk their respective neighborhoods for 60 - 90 minutes, talking about their goings-ons
Ray spent the better part of a day riding around a 20-section ranch (20 square miles) with Jill’s brother, Mark, checking on cattle, water tanks, and talking about mining sand. A fair amount of the land in that general location generates a lot of oil production. But the newly developed process of fracking requires a very fine-grain sand to be pumped back into the and to replace the space previously taken up by millions of barrels of oil. Turns out for years they’ve been mining it in Michigan and Wisconsin and shipping it all around.
Well, the Monahans area has sand. They’ve always known that, but it turns out that the sand is the right kind of sand. So popping up on many of the ranches are sand mining plants. The sand it right near the surface, so they dig it up, send it to a plant which washes and sifts it and puts it down in the fracking holes. Voila, tens of millions of dollars in “sand rights.” A gazillion trucks running every which way (and sometimes over cars), a gazillion railroad cars full of sand.
Monahans > Alpine
Terre was interested in reliving her life from ages 4-6 and to hear every story Ray and Jill could remember and there were a few.
Story 1 : The Dairy Queen about 1.2 mile from the city limits to see if they still sell Steak Fingers with fries and gravy. They did. Ray was not disappointed. He estimates that they ate this 80 or so times back in the 70s.
Deer seen : 4
Alpine > Marfa > Alpine
We had a 2:00 reservation to visit the artist studio of sculptor, Donald Judd. Just for the record, if you are late you cannot continue. A second thing for the record is we spent a bit too much time eating steak fingers and had to drive 50 miles to Marfa. This caused Terre to push the driving speed to slightly excessive levels. This in turned caught the attention of the state police who desperately wanted to see if license, insurance and all checked out. It did. We were not clearly late. And yes, if you are late then you are out of luck Fortunately, Terre only got a warning. Ray did get a killer “THE” photo. See below.
Deer and antelope seen : 9.
Alpine > McDonald Observatory > Alpine
We had lived 3 years in Alpine from 1971 - 1974 and never driven the 60 miles to the observatory. Stupid. Turns out they were having a “Sky Party” the same night as our first night in Alpine. The 4 of us went into the theater and spent a great hour listening to a great talk about astronomy, space and lots of explanations that explained some great details of things you sort of know, but really don’t. Then we headed to the outdoor theater for some hands (eyes more so) on, astronomy-related experiences. Temperature was around 30°. The area was pretty covered with snow as the Observatory was perched on top of the highest mountain in the area. Laser pointers focused us on starts. Outlines of constellations were drawn in the slightly hazy air. The International Space Station even did a well-timed fly by.
You could look through 3 small and 3 much larger telescopes. I mean actually look through the actual eye-pieces. We saw a full moon view of the full first-quarter noon (see how nicely I worked that newly learned astronomical term into the conversation); a closeup view of the area around the Aristotle Crater, a binary star system, Mars, two globular galaxies (not at all close together but looked like they were side-by-side, and a nice view of the Pleiades star cluster. Just a killer night. They had a few, small letterpress prints. We were thinking of sending them a critique of the evening and even to offer to do a couple of prints
Deer seen : 24 (37 for the whole day)
Alpine > Big Bend National Park > Marathon > Alpine
Breakfast at Magoo’s started our day with Magoo greeting us at the door. Great everything right down to the syrup on the pancakes. Maybe a bit heavy on the sausage given the long day we were getting ready to ride in the car.
In a lot of descriptions of Texas, you hear the words, “big sky.” Yep. We drove the 125 miles to Big Bend National Park and up into the part called “The Basin.” Breathtaking. The big story from the 70s was a hike Ray had taken with the “Art Club.” Yep, the Art Club to Boot Sprints. 5.5 miles up and over a pretty serious mountain and the 5.5 miles walk up and over coming back the next morning with an elevation change of about 1/2 mile. Ray never could quite remember exactly where the path was. Starting up a conversation with two guys that were clearly getting ready to start a serious trek answered his question. We talked for a moment about retracing the hike, but brains won our over brawn and we started the drive to Santa Elena Canyon.
Santa Elena Canyon
The result of a massive fault and a lot of millions of years of water cutting through the high side of the fault has resulted in. Ray and Terre took the 1.6 mile walk into the canyon which was as fabulous as it was tiring.
Marathon
Back in the 70s we had discovered a road cut which exposed some interesting fossils called “crinoids” — small animals that looked kind of like a vertibrae. We spent about an hour searching and came up with a good cupful. Here is a photo taken of my mother with a 450,000,000 old necklace we made for her back in the day.
Back in Alpine we ate at Reata’s. Ray thought the Chicken Fried Steak was one of his favorites ever. At least in the top 3 or 4 and Ray has eaten this meal literally in every restaurant he has eaten in that has it on the menu.
Deer seen : 63 for the whole day