Not So Good Timing...

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

In the past few days we’ve gone from Marathon -> McDonald Observatory, TX: 77 miles

We’ve kind of been all over the place since we stayed in Marathon. We planned on waking up on Sunday and biking 30 miles to Alpine to rent a car until we realized that the rental place was closed on Sunday. So Sunday we hung out in Marathon...which worked out very well since it was the first rainy day since Louisiana. After hanging out for half of the day we biked 30 miles to Alpine and stayed there for the night. It was a chilly 30 miles!! Monday morning we woke up and headed straight to the rental place to get there when they opened. The guy working there was not helpful at all and there were no cars for rent…just 1 Uhaul. We were pretty bummed, because we were stoked to see Big Bend AND we waited around for a day to rent a car.

We're in a cloud!

Once we got over that we headed towards Marfa. Marfa isn’t on our route, but we were told that we needed to see Marfa…that it was an interesting, minimalist art town. Of course, I wanted to go check out all of the art. Marfa was definitely an interesting town! And since our timing has been so great for the past couple days…that didn’t change when we got to Marfa. Almost everything was closed, because apparently nothing is really open on Monday’s. Joe and I found a grocery store that was open and stocked up on rice, snacks, grits, etc.

Of course we had to get some donuts before heading to Marfa!

There were buildings like this everywhere in Marfa

Coffee shop we sat at for a bit

After hanging out in Marfa we headed towards Fort Davis and then on to the McDonalds Observatory just 10 miles past town. Fort Davis was a beautiful, cute little town! Our plan was to hit the McDonald Observatory that day…Joe has been stoked to check it out! They have Star Parties at night and we couldn’t pass that up! Once again, we found out that the star parties are only on Tuesday, Friday, or Saturday. So…………again we wait. It’s Monday and we know that to go to a Star Party we would have to take another break day. When are we going to get another chance to go to a star party at an observatory 7,000 ft up?!?! Probably not anytime soon…so we decided to camp just down the hill of the Observatory at Davis Mountains State Park. One of the ladies working at the park, Karen, ended up paying for our camping! She was the nicest! We were even debating wether to camp there because it was kind of expensive. After a cold night of camping we got our stuff together and headed up the steep mountain towards the Observatory. They have a cafe and day time tours so we went to check that out. So we just finished the day tour where we went to see the giant telescopes that they have here…so cool! & we are waiting in the cafe for the Star Party! It starts around 8:30. Hopefully the weather clears up a little…its been pretty rainy.