Trip to West Texas, March 27-29

At the end of March we'd planned to drive to Carlsbad Caverns (NM), but the trip got to be too ambitious -- so we headed to West Texas instead. Dave really liked the scenery/geology out there, and wanted to see more.

Our first stop was in the Midland-Odessa area, for the Commemorative Air Force Museum -- WWII aircraft. We also drove by the George W. Bush Childhood Home (make of that what you will) in Midland, and the Odessa Meteor Crater. But the CAF Museum was really well done; we all enjoyed it. It was a little hard on Katie, but she really got into the "teeth". We saw an exhibit of nose art, not for the prudish, but with several examples of shark teeth painted on the nose. We didn't see any restored aircraft "with teeth", but we did see this Jeep. That's what Katie remembers.

We stayed a couple of nights in the town of Ft. Davis, which we really enjoyed. We are such small-town people now! The town exists because of the 19th-century fort. It was interesting, and very different from Eastern forts, usually Revolutionary War era, that I'd ever seen.

We really went mostly for the McDonald Observatory near Ft. Davis. Anyone who has heard "Stardate" on NPR will know the name. No, we did not see Sandy Wood. But we saw cool telescopes, including the Hobby-Eberly that was built while we were at Penn State (it's a Penn State creation). You can see how big the mirrors are in these telescopes -- here's Katie lying down in a representation of their 107" mirror telescope. On our tour Katie got to push the button that opened the window in the dome. She was excited. We went to an evening program that was fun and interesting, and got to look through a whole bunch of telescopes at the moon, Saturn, the Pleiades, and the Orion Nebula (VERY cool). And I learned that it is possible to look through telescopes with a sleeping toddler on your shoulder. You can't star-watch before most kids' usual bedtimes.

The highlight for us was spending time with the family we had met at Big Bend the previous month. They live and work at the observatory, and we got in touch with them when we headed out. They invited us to a gathering of friends at their house on Sunday before we left to come back to San Antonio. We had a wonderful time, and think we've found some lifelong friends. How random, meeting in the dining room at the Big Bend lodge. Hi, Marc and Teri, if you read this!