Melyssa-with-a-Y

Homeward Bound  We got up at 8 – I smelled bacon! – and showered and went into the main house for breakfast. The Inn’s cook made us breakfast (we never got their names!) – scrambled eggs, toast, hash browns and Canadian bacon. Here, at least, the coffee was better. We were the only people staying in the house, so the staff sat and chatted with us for a while. We got an impromptu history lesson about Fort Davis – one woman’s mother had worked in town for Harvard University’s radio telescope astronomers (and that is why there’s a Harvard Hotel in town!) so she had been there since the late 50’s. She talked about how different it was once the NPS took over the Fort itself – kids used to go and climb on the ruins, etc. She also told us that there are four foreign exchange students staying in the house, and one of them is the Polish kid that we’d seen at Murphy’s and the Drugstore.   (aha!) We had to stop at the Davis Mountain Nut Co. store in town – we’d had their “mocha m...

Day 3: McDonald Observatory Wednesday morning, we started with some instant oatmeal in our room, rather than trying to hunt for a breakfast spot again. And here we come to lesson #4: The coffee in west Texas sucks .  Granted, it was hotel room coffee, but even the stuff from the lobby was bad. Even Alice’s coffee on Tuesday was bad. And the trend continued through McDonald and Fort Davis. Or maybe I’m just spoiled by the awesome coffee maker we have at home, and the ready access to Starbucks, which hasn’t made it out to Marfa yet. Just sayin’.  I stopped in the gift shop for a Marfa t-shirt, and we set off to the north for Fort Davis and the McDonald Observatory . We stopped for lunch in Fort Davis at Murphy’s and had subs. They were really good. We also learned lesson #5: everything comes with a bag of Lay’s potato chips.   At first, I ate them, but later in the trip we just started hanging on to them, and came home with 4 bags in our “snack sack,” whi...

Marfa, McDonald and Beyond This is the wonderful trip John planned for me for my birthday (6 months ago) and only revealed in early July. When he had the idea in February, the first time the tickets were available to the special viewing at the 107” telescope at McDonald was August 21. So that became the central event around which the trip was built. We left on Monday and started the drive west. We stopped for lunch in Mason, TX – a quaint little town with a population of 2,104. The town’s claim to fame is that the largest blue topaz found in the US was discovered there. But of course that museum was closed on Mondays. (We should’ve sensed a theme…) We had lunch and looked around a bit, added a little gas to the tank, and got back on the road. (114 miles) Turns out Mason was exactly half-way to our first planned vacation destination, the Caverns of Sonora , in Sonora, TX (114 miles).  The caverns are a National Natural Landmark. The cave was warm and muggy (98% h...