Alpine, Texas

The town of Alpine, Texas is a reminder that this country will surprise us from time to time.  Nancy and I tend to have a stereotypically negative opinion of Texans - loud, full of themselves, love the Dallas Cowboys and hate Californians.  And there's not much to recommend the state to us outside a few of its cities.  The chance we'd seriously consider living there was close to zero.

Then Nancy saw the real estate prices.  "Maybe we shouldn't totally rule Alpine out," she said.  "Here's a property with 9000 square feet of attractive living space for a fraction of what it would cost in California."

"But we don't actually want a big house, right?"

"Yes, absolutely, but this is an amazing bargain."

As it turned out, the residents of Alpine are sweet, friendly, helpful, and well, likable.  And the town is actually pretty nice, with an excellent grocery, interesting shops, some good neighborhoods, a university, and scenery that is much less ugly than most of what we'd been driving through.

We toured an excellent Museum of the Big Bend on the grounds of Sul Ross University and learned a lot about the history of the area, which adjoins Big Bend National Park, including Indian wars, the battles against Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, stories of the Buffalo Soldiers (consisting of proud black cavalry fighters led by white officers), and cowboy life on the range.  There was also a wonderful display of the works of Charles Russell, who painted vivid scenes of the old American west.

A few words about our life on the road.  The first part of the trip is through territory that we are frankly unlikely to like enough to move to.  We want to live around trees and lush landscapes, and to this point we've driven through desert scenery almost exclusively.  At least the land around Alpine, Texas has grasslands (not just scrub brush) and hills close by - but it's still far from beautiful (to us).

So we're moving much faster through the southwest than we will when we cross the Mississippi River.  Mostly only one or two days per RV park and longer drives when we do change location.

But we're having fun and it's not boring.  Much of our spare time initially has been spent getting the motorhome shipshape and ready for a year's voyage.  In Las Cruces, New Mexico, our previous stop, we hired a superb mobile repairman to replace our water pump so we'd have running water on the road when we aren't connected to park facilities.  He also got our dash air conditioning and heating fans working properly by repairing some vacuum lines that had been chewed by Ben Lomond rodents without permission.

We bought a new phone for Nancy, a great touchscreen laptop (highly recommended), a small wireless printer, and a hotspot wifi router, which will allow a number of devices to connect to the internet seamlessly.  We signed up for a Verizon unlimited data plan, which for the first time will let us stream video from Netflix, Amazon, and others.

There is a satellite dish on the roof of the motorhome which automatically aligns itself to the DirecTV satellites at each location.  It's been flawless in the past, but on this trip it only brings in a bit more than half the channels, even after extensive conversations with tech support people at both DirecTV and Winegard, the manufacturer of the rooftop satellite dish.  Luckily, the local sports channel is among those that come in fine, so I can still receive the Warriors and Sharks games.  Otherwise I would be inconsolable.  But we have an appointment Tuesday in San Antonio with a shop that should be able to get that fixed.

We eat well on the road.  We do periodically go out to interesting local restaurants, but some of the best meals on this trip have been those prepared by the onboard staff.  One night we had amazing grilled lamb chops served with Nancy's killer caramelized onions.  Another time we enjoyed excellent six hour slow-cooked short ribs in red wine sauce.  But our best meal was when we grilled dry-aged rib eye steaks bought at Whole Foods.  Sinfully rich and fattening but oh, my.

Tonight after dark we drove about twenty miles to a chilly view spot near Marfa, Texas to look for the mysterious lights - unexplained by science - which have been observed and talked about for hundreds of years.  We joined several other couples, one of whom sadly had been flooded from their home in Houston and had not been able to return.  After our eyes had adapted to the darkness, Nancy and I thought we saw the lights in question.  And the sky at this location, far from town lights, presented us with the most amazing view of the universe we could remember.  This is the kind of transformative adventure you, too, could experience if you committed to staying in trailer parks for a while.