Today was the beginning of our week long trip around Texas and New Mexico! Its the kids spring break, so Dwain and I decided we would take them on a very cool trip that would take us from home to Ft. Stockton, TX; Marathon, TX; Big Bend National Park; through El Paso, TX and Las Cruces, NM; to White Sands, Alamogordo, NM; through Lincoln, NM and Roswell, NM; to Canyon, TX; Amarillo, TX; Ft. Worth, TX and then back home! Over all it is about 2200 miles that we will drive over the next 7 days!
This morning we got up at 5am! We had loaded most everything in the car last night and then we dressed the kids and put them in the car so they could sleep while we drove 372 miles to Ft. Stockton...the first stop on our trip. Dwain just got a new car yesterday and it came just in time for our trip! Luckily for us it had a DVD player in it and we had headphones for the kids to keep them occupied since we were going to be in the car for a majority of this trip!
It is a cute little Scion XB :) And the great thing about it...it gets great gas mileage!
On this trip down, Dwain and I were joking that he and I were like kids because we were looking at everything going...look at that...look over there! Our heads were like on swivels cause we kept looking around so much!
The roads looked cool to me for some reason?!
The speed limit was 80 almost our entire trip
We were surrounded by mountains almost the entire trip down!
And we were surrounded by windmills almost the entire way too!
The kids were both out cold as we were getting closer to Ft. Stockton
Once we got to Ft. Stockton we found the historic part and went into the visitors center. Ft. Stockton was established in 1858 by troops of the 1st and 8th Infantry, US Army. It was named for Commodore Robert Field Stockton, a naval officer who distinguished himself during the Mexican War. The US Army withdrew from Texas during the Civil War and abandoned CampStockton in 1861. In July 1867, Colonel Edward Hatch, Commander of the 9th Cavalry, re-established Fort Stockton at its present location. The new fort was garrisoned by four companies of the 9th Cavalry, one of the new regiments created for the black men who sought security in the US Army after the Civil War. These black enlisted men, called "buffalo soldiers" by the Indians, were commanded by white officers.
It was really cool to be here and see that of the original buildings, four still remain: the Guardhouse and three of the eight Officers' Quarters.
This is inside one of the Officers' Quarters
Walking to the Guardhouse
Inside the guardhouse
They say that these chains are original to the building
Abby and Riley with a wagon used in John Wayne movies!
This was set up to look like the barracks the guys stayed in
The Roadrunner is big down here! They had a big statue of one so we got out and took some pictures of it!
After we left Ft. Stockton, we drove 60 miles to Marathon, Texas where we would be staying in our "hacienda"! It was a cute little place we were staying, but was also in the middle of NO WHERE! lol It was one room with a bed, table and chairs and a little kitchen and it had a cute little bathroom!
Once we got settled we ventured out to see what we could find...and we found nothing! I knew from looking at the maps when were creating this trip that Alpine, Texas was only 30 miles away so we decided to drive there and see what we could find...again, we found not much of anything! We got out and walked around for a minute, they had a few shops and restaurants and they had a movie theater that had 2 movies playing. So we decided to drive into Marfa, Texas which was only 26 miles away and it was worse than Alpine! So we went back to Alpine and we went to the movie Alice in Wonderland then we got dinner at little place and headed back to our hacienda to call it a night.
This was a painting on the side of a building in Alpine
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