Molly with the tracks book at the edge of the rio Grande ("Now, is it a mink or an otter?"). My only contribution was to make bad otter jokes. (You otter think up a couple yourself).

                    Headed out of Santa Elena; I have to pinch myself it's so beautiful; these two girls ain't bad either.












Ok, a little confession. We've got this satellite, see, only it hasn't really worked very well. There were two problems--just when you get it all lined up to watch CNN or the Disney Channel, it switches by itself to the pay-per-view channel and you have to switch it back. As if that wasn't annoying enough, after you get it switched back to your original channel, the dish would start to move and we'd lose the signal and have to start all over. It was pretty frustrating, especially after two months.

Well it got so bad, I was driven to READ THE DIRECTIONS. And guess what? Switching to Channel 200 (which happens to be the pay-per-view schedule) is part of the dish's signal-fixing routine and you're supposed to leave it there for thirty seconds, then everything is set. So when we immediately switched back (without waiting the requisite 30 seconds), we confused the dish into thinking it had the wrong signal and it went looking for another satellite.

Mary thinks this is hilarious; so maybe I'll read the directions next time, but I'll still never ask for directions and don't even talk to me about the remote.




Hey--look who's driving the big cahuna! Mary takes the wheel from Big Bend up to Alpine. She found it easier than she expected and had no problem, even on a fairly curvy mountain road. There are more miles at the helm in her future.


One of the best things about this trip is that we don't have much of an itinerary--no deadlines and no particular destinations. This means that we can follow the weather or tips from fellow RVers, who tend to be a gregarious bunch with lots of advice. Which is how we got to Ft. Davis, Texas ("cool observatory"), a great stop we almost certainly would have missed had we tried to set up each stop months in advance. And I wouldn't have gotten to order a custom made cowboy hat at the Limpia Creek Hat Company, located on Ft. Davis' main drag. (Sure enough, Mary read about it in a brochure on the region).



Jim and Judy Spradley showed me how a real cowboy hat is made and became friends at the same time. Did you know that a good hat is made of beaver fur? Or that when it's finished, it's literally sanded to make it smooth? Wait till you see mine (it'll be ready in about six weeks; Jim will send it to Mary's friend Mary Ickes in Oregon); it's going to be way cool.


Ft. Davis used to be a real fort--set up to protect travelers from Apache raiding parties in the latter half of the 19th Century. The fort itself in the process of restoration and is a fascinating window into this period of our history.



The officer quarters on the parade ground; the fort is surrounded on three sides by sheer mountain walls, but that didn't keep it from falling into the hands of Texas confederates during the Civil War.

One of the most interesting things about this fort is that it was home to a regiment of African American cavalrymen after the war--the famous Buffalo Soldiers. There is a certain irony, I think, in black soldiers fighting Indians of behalf of white politicians.