Day 01

It probably isn't fair to actually say "Day 01", as this post covers the first two days.  However, they did run together.  It began yesterday at 12:30pm when Briggs got off work and we hopped into the car to head towards Van Horn, Texas - some 1,500 miles away.  We hit torrential downpours, ridiculous traffic and most species of insect found in the southeastern US.  But we limped across the Texas border at 2am and paused, momentarily, at the Lone Star welcome center.

From there it was Houston, San Antonio and then the high plains of Texas.  We made a detour to Marfa TX, down in the Big Bend area via US 67 and US 90.  Marfa is a small (pop 2,200) ranching community that was home to James Dean’s last movie, Giant, and also a shooting location for numerous other films including No Country for Old Men.  Today, the town is best known as a community of (mainly) minimalist artists.  It sits in the middle of nowhere.  The town’s slogan is “Tough to get to. Tougher to explain. But once you get here, you get it.”

Well ... we got there.... but we're still processing it.  It was interesting, but just doesn't seem to be really open for business.  Next week is the Annual Marfa Film Festival, but we could only find one small restaurant that was open for business today.  It is definitely a community of starving artists... but I'm not sure if the lack of restaurants was a cause or an effect.  We walked all over town, along with a few other tourists.  There are several houses close to the main street that have been nicely renovated or turned into modern/minimalists abodes.  There is a really cool theater for performing arts downtown, but no information on upcoming events (other than the aforementioned film festival).  There is a very well preserved hotel downtown, where the cast of Giant stayed during there filming; however, even its restaurant was closed.

In Marfa, US 67 splits from US 90 and heads due south to the Mexican border. It is about 60 miles from Marfa to Presidio TX – a town of about 4,000 people on the border with Mexico; on the other side of the border is Ojinaga, a town of about 23,000 people.  For all intents and purposes, Presidio’s only road connection with the rest of the US is via this lonely stretch of US 67.  The town is so isolated that it only has a single power line connecting it with the Texas power grid.  To compensate for this tenuous power source, the town has built the world’s largest sodium-sulfur battery to store power in the event that single line goes down.

There is nothing between Marfa and the Mexican border town of Presidio, which, as previously mentioned, is 60 miles south.  Nothing that is except for the ghost town of Shafter, TX, with a population of 11.  At one time, over 4,000 people had lived in Shafter and there were thriving silver mines.  However, the town saw rapid decline when the mines closed in the 1940’s.  Shafter has recently achieved a certain amount of notoriety as being the closest town to the Cibolo Creek Ranch, where Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, 2016.  Here’s an interesting tidbit, the Cibola Creek Ranch covers an area of about 47 square miles; to put that in context, Washington, DC is only about 68 square miles.  It’s a big ranch.


All that background information on Shafter and Presidio is interesting, but not relevant since we didn't make the trip to Presidio.  We tried to find Shafter, but turned around as we were running a little low on fuel.  I can't adequately explain how desolate it is out here.  The vast emptiness makes it so beautiful and lonely - and a very poor place to run out of gas.

After Marfa (and a quick stop at the Marfa Prada) we headed to Van Horn, which is on I-10.  Almost all of "today's" trip was on I-10, except for the excursions mainly to Marfa. The road from Marfa to Van Horn was beautiful, barren and empty (except for the Prada Marfa store, which is about 37 miles outside of Marfa).  One interesting tidbit about Van Horn is that it is the terminus for US 90, which starts in Jacksonville; on the east side of Jacksonville it is Beach Boulevard, which means nothing unless you’re from Jacksonville and know that it is a major thoroughfare.  For much of its route out west, US 90 parallels I-10 somewhat closely; although, as we learned on the Ghia trip, it can be very slow going when you pass through towns (especially Tallahassee and Mobile). 

We checked into our hotel (a brand new Hampton Inn), then headed out to wash the car of the 12 pounds of insects it had collected and grab dinner at a Mexican restaurant called Chuy.  There is a chain of Mexican restaurants headquartered in Texas called "Chuy", but apparently this isn't one of them.  This one has a table permanently reserved for John Madden.

We are exhausted.  With the exception of a few naps in the car, we have both been up for about 40 hours straight.  Tomorrow is a big hiking day.