Thursday January 31, 2008

Our plans for a quick dinner went awry last night. We walked across to the pizza house and after a half hour, we found that they had lost the ticket and hadn't put it in the oven yet. We left, hungry, and drove into town to a burger place. Again, we waited for a long time - the waitress kept coming back and apologizing - we thinks the first order got burned or something. We finally got our dinner and left the waitress an extra tip as she did not charge us for our drinks because we had to wait so long. Came back to the hotel and caught the end of "A Few Good Men" on TV.

After breakfast this morning, we got the cooler out of the car and emptied it in preparation for our stop at the grocery store tomorrow. We also found a number of things that we have picked up along the trip that we don't need with us - we sent them to Amy in a box and stopped at the Post Office in town to mail it off. We drove up to Fort Davis which is just north of here and visited the Fort Davis National Historical site. It was an army fort which was occupied from 1854 to 1891 with a small hiatus during the Civil War. Some of the buildings were in ruins (adobe), but many were in fairly good shape (brick). Some of the buildings have been restored and furnished to the period. Most of the work was done by graduate students in historical preservation from the University of Vermont! We spent quite a while there tromping around the grounds and viewing the museum. We ate our mini-lunch in the car as the wind is still howling day and the temp is only 40. From here, we could see the large buildings on top of a mountain that are the Mc Donald Observatory. We didn't go up however as they are only open to the public on Friday and Saturday nights. We will try to make a special trip for that. On the way back to Alpine, we stopped at the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center. We walked their extensive botanical gardens and visited the greenhouse. They have an amazing number of trees, shrubs, and cacti growing in the gardens and it was interesting to look at the various types of cacti some of which we are sure to see in Big Bend. We are now back in Alpine and will go out in a while for dinner. This will probably be the last blog posting for a bit as I am sure we will not be able to access the Internet in the park. Our plan is to continue to blog each day and then post them all at once when we come back to town to re-supply (probably in a week or so). We saw a sign that the Mc Donald's in town has wireless sevice available so we will probably be using their service.