Saturday, February 1 – Tuesday February 4th

Fort Davis, TX was a good midway stopping point for us between Carlsbad Caverns and Big Bend National Park. On the way, we decided to stop by Guadalupe Mountains National Park so we could pick up a few stamps for the kids’ National Parks Passports and a sticker for the camper.

We thought it would be fun to be at Fort Davis because it is a historical site. Clark also made a reservation for us to attend a Star Party at the McDonald Observatory, just a few miles away, on Saturday evening. The observatory is a part of the University of Texas at Austin. One of the faculty astronomers walked us through the constellations outside in the amphitheater. What started out as a rather hazy evening for star viewing, became nice and clear for us to see almost the entire night’s sky. We also were given telescope viewings of Venus, the Moon, M-37, M-42, and Uranus, Orion nebula and finally we sat in an indoor theater where they walked us through some incredible photography taken by Hubble Space Telescope.

We decided to do a mountain bike ride, the Lipia Creek Trail to the Sheep Pen Canyon Loop in the Davis Mountains State Park. We went to a pretty primitive site that required us to check in with the ranger and get a code to the fence that would allow us to park. After 2.5 miles of pushing our bikes up the hill, over shale rocks and single track, we finally connected with Sheep Pen Trail. From there, it was just more of the same. Locals were videoing us going up the trail- I suppose that should have been our first hint that perhaps we were in over our heads, or just some new form of Bend, OR CRAZY! I don’t mountain bike nor does Izzy, we leave that to my brothers, my dad, Ben and Clark, so this was insanely difficult for us. I will say that it was an amazing emotional and physical feat. Riggs was with us the entire time and ran/trotted almost the entire way. He slept well that evening!

We celebrated the Super Bowl in style with some of the locals on the 2nd floor of the Blue Mountain Bar and Grill. We felt like we were in the game room of a bunch of friends. We got there early, so this picture we took was before the festivities began.

The local library was a historic site as well. It was a former trading company store, equipped with general merchandise, guns, ammunition, post office, machine shop, feed store and telephone exchange- they used barbed wire to connect with the ranches. Preservation work was being completed while we were there, but there were at least 15 or so folks on-site that day, in addition to the high schoolers who were there for lunch as a part of their open campus. I was astounded by the number of DVDs they had. I suppose in a small town that’s a welcome form of entertainment. Ben managed to double task his PE assignment after he’d finished up some US History.

We couldn’t leave Fort Davis without doing some tours of the historical landmark, Fort Davis National Monument. We rode our bikes about a half mile from the RV park. Ben, Izzy and I explored the barracks, the corrals, the mess hall, many of the officers’ quarters, the hospital and the grounds. The kiddos learned a lot about how families lived at forts like this, how the company went about their business each day and how important and highly regarded medical doctors were. They also learned about how little frontier medicine knew about bacteria, infections and how they spread- many folks died because of the use of unsanitary tools.