On Monday afternoon we left Grandmom and Granddad’s house after a 2 month stay to continue our road trip without our trailer. Stephen found a buyer for the Airstream while I was in Canada for my last week of teacher training. The day after I returned, we packed up all of our things that wouldn’t fit in the truck to be shipped to our house in Maine. Our first stop was Fredericksburg, Texas. We stayed in a lovely, old house that creaked at night. Stephen got up both nights we were there to check to make sure there really wasn’t a person walking around the house and was given a fright by the jackets hanging on the coatrack by the door. The following day we hiked Enchanted Rock. Stephen and the kids looked for the cave Stephen crawled through when he was in college while I waited outside to do some cloud gazing.

On Wednesday, we arrived in Fort Stockton, Texas where we stayed one night. We spent Thursday and Friday in Fort Davis, Texas with a brief visit in Marfa. Stephen and I had a delicious kale and pistachio salad at Aster, a small cafe in Marfa where the local border patrol were also dining. We stopped briefly at Building 98, which was an active army base in WWII where German POW soldiers stayed. Zoey and Zane were eager to see the mural painted in the ballroom by a German POW that they heard about listening to the Sparkle story “Fifty: The Stars, the States, and the Stories” about Texas. Last night we drove up to McDonald Observatory for the Star Party. It was a cloudy night unfortunately, but we were able to see a few constellations and looked through two telescopes at the moon and Venus before heading inside for a brief show to look at photos of the Pleiades, Orion nebula, and the Andromeda galaxy.

On our drive today just outside of the soon to be ghost town of Valentine, Texas we did a double take while passing a Prada store in the middle of nowhere.  The store is actually just an art installation, and there are real Prada shoes and handbags from the Fall 2005 collection inside but no door to enter.  Pretty strange.

 

We’ll be in Las Cruces, New Mexico for two nights, then a short stay in Tuscon and Sedona, Arizona before arriving back in California.