Weeks 18-21 (ish): Docked in El Paso

March 14, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Weeks 18-21 (ish): Docked in El Paso

After a week in Marfa – and an epic day in Big Bend – we continued on to our final stop in Texas: El Paso. A mere 850 miles from the eastern edge of the state, El Paso is on the border with both New Mexico and Regular Mexico, and it’s a pretty big city. Driving in from Marfa, a town with a population of 2,000, the change was jarring – like returning to civilization after living in the desert (which is accurate). We also went from sleepy, empty highways to a busier world, with much narrower lanes.

Luckily, we managed to avoid slamming our 12,000 pound house into anybody or anything, and soon enough, we made it to our home for almost all of November: Jake’s mom’s house. Basically, we parked our RV there while borrowing her electricity, sweet sweet Internet, and power tools. We have since learned that the RV term of art for this type of visit is “moochdocking,” and we moochdocked to full effect. Along the way, we made some upgrades, met some great people, and really got to know the layout of Home Depot.

Renovations!

Apart from visiting Jake’s mom (whom we will call Ginny from here on out to make things a little easier), our main goal in El Paso was to make a few small DIY modifications to our RV. One quick week, we thought, which stretched into 10 days… then two weeks… and then three. We won’t rehash all the upgrades we made, since you can check out our blog post on the renovations for pictures and the blow-by-blow. Suffice it to say that we made a lot of trips to Home Depot and Lowe’s (so many trips!), ordered a lot of things from Amazon (so many things!), and took over all of the unused space in Ginny’s house (we are so messy!).

It was even worse than you might think, actually, since Ginny has been graciously storing all of our “old life” stuff in boxes in her garage. We started ripping those boxes open on the very first day we got to El Paso, but didn’t exactly get around to cleaning them back up until the end.

It was basically this Simpsons gif:

via GIPHY

Thanks again!

Art!

Aside from our daily work on the RV, our biggest activity in El Paso involved art. We went to multiple galleries, including shows featuring impressive work by Ginny, her friend Karla (already wisely following Nothing Mundane), and the talented and unusually-named Random. We saw was some really great work, and Heather even got to contribute a cool little painting of her own.

The best part of these shows was not just the pieces, however, but the extremely friendly people. We’ve been to a lot of very friendly places on this trip, but El Paso might have been the friendliest of all. Everywhere we went, we were treated fantastically well – not just with the sometimes sharp-elbowed politeness of the South, but real, genuine niceness. In fact, at every gallery we went to, we were invited by total strangers to numerous other events, including parties, shows, and even an artistic hairstyling gallery event (!) which we were sadly unable to attend.

Stylin’. via GIPHY

Food!

Separate and apart from the visual feast described above, we undertook a lot of actual feasting in El Paso. We had great BBQ at the State Line restaurant (on the border between Texas and New Mexico), including bread with honey butter we are drooling about as we write this post. We grabbed gorditas from the Little Diner, an amazing local hole-in-the-wall (“Make Gorditas, not war!”). And Jake had an incredible burger from a local restaurant, Angry Owl, which came with tongue-melting ghost pepper cheese. Ghost peppers, if you don’t know, were once the hottest peppers in the world, and rate at over 1,000,000 SHUs (400x higher than Tabasco sauce). “A delicious mistake,” he said, through his tears.

via GIPHY

Of course, we also had lots of great homemade meals, since Ginny is an excellent cook, including an unnecessary but oh-so-necessary amount of bacon for breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner. Mmm, bacon. And to top our stay off, we were treated to an awesome Thanksgiving meal every bit as good as it looks.

Events!

There was lots more than food and art, of course. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to do much hiking, but we did enjoy wandering around downtown El Paso and taking pictures of some of the local landmarks. (Ginny has many more.)

We got to play with the “DIGIE-wall,” which is a wall composed of large outdoor touchscreens that displays information about El Paso. The digie-wall was pretty cool; you can swipe around to see the geography of the city, check out local attractions and historical information, and take washed-out photos of your group. Mostly, we were impressed by the moxie of the local business that somehow uploaded billboards for itself into nearly every corner of (virtual) El Paso.

What else… We tried an Escape Room, which we failed pretty spectacularly. Oh, and you know how we mentioned digging into our boxes on our first day there? Well, it was Halloween, and since Jake had an old costume in storage, he decided to dig it out…

OH. YEAH.

RECENT NEWS

What’s now: We just finished a week in Pinnacles National Park and Monterey, California, including a harrowing three days without Internet. Technically, we survived.

What’s next: San Francisco, and then Yosemite National Park. Semi-winter hiking, here we come…

Obligatory social media self-promotion: If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates. Your technical survival is assured!

Shamefully missed a prior post? We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you. To see every road trip blog post, click here.

Next Post: Weeks 21-22: Facing the Truth or Consequences

March 7, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 17.1: Around The Big Bend

We talked in our last blog post about our week in Marfa, a cool desert art town in the middle of nowhere, but our day trip from Marfa to Big Bend National Park deserved its own post. Big Bend is a remote desert wonderland, a giant wilderness preserve chock full of crazy mountains, beautiful vistas, and incredible surprises.

It’s so spectacular, it nearly made us sick.

Location, Location, Location

Let’s start with location: to say Big Bend is “remote” does not do it justice. The park is about 100 miles south of Marfa, which we have already established is in the middle of nowhere, so it is fair to say that Big Bend is 100 miles south of the middle of nowhere. You might call it the edge of nowhere.

The edge of the edge of nowhere is the Rio Grande, which is also the U.S.-Mexico border. The other edges are desert. There are few roads that lead to Big Bend, and the closest airport of any size is in El Paso. The closest “city” is Alpine, Texas, population 6,000, about an hour away. As you will see, the only nearby town, Terlingua, is part ghost.

Suffice it to say, getting to Big Bend is not an easy task, and we saw few other people when we visited (probably less than 100 total). Adding to the feeling of isolation is the park’s huge size: about 800,000 acres, slightly larger than Rhode Island. Unlike Rhode Island, of course, there are no cool hippy markets or walks along fabulous oceanside mansions, but on the plus side, there are a lot of bears.

Wait. Is that really a plus?

Ye Olde Ghost Towne

Our first stop on the way to Big Bend was at Terlingua, a ghost town with a twist. Terlingua was once a mining community, before it went bust, and the ruins of the town still remain, slowly decaying in the desert. Spooky ghost town graveyard? Sign us up.

Terlingua’s twist is that some flesh-and-blood humans still live there, right alongside the ruins. These hardy folk provide services to park entrants and visitors to the edge of nowhere, running a few restaurants, a cafe, and a gift shop. We might have thought they were ghosts too, but no ghost would have the gumption to charge $4.50 for a large iced coffee. (We would have been mad except that the coffee was delicious, and also, there were no alternatives within 60 miles.)

One of the few shops in town is an art gallery, and surprisingly (?), they had some cool sculptures on display outside. Our favorite was a piece called “Blow Out Survivor,” which the accompanying text explained was created from the melted remains of a natural gas well that caught fire. It burned for three days, and at the end, portions of the crankshaft, engine, and gearing were fused together.

We don’t have a gas well, but we were reliant on modern engineering, in the form of our poor Honda Fit. The question of whether it would be “blowout” or “survivor” was yet to come.

Bear Patrol

After we had finished being gouged by the local merchants, we headed into the park itself. On the way in, we got to live the dream of anyone who has ever visited a National Park: we bought a National Parks Pass! $80 for one years’ free access to every federal park and national monument. Access fees are normally $10-$25, so it’s a decent deal if you plan to visit 4 or more parks in a year. It’s an extraordinarily great deal if you do something crazy like, say, quitting your job to travel around in an RV for a year.

And so, pass in hand, we were ready to Big Bend it like Beckham. As we mentioned before, the park is massive, but there are essentially three distinct regions: mountain, desert, and river. Part of the charm lies in how they all pile up on top of each other, particularly the mountains and the desert.

The remainder of the charm is how stinking beautiful it all is.

Our first stop was at the visitor center, located in the mountains. We had planned our trip to Big Bend the way we usually plan things – which is to say, not at all – so we asked about the hikes and the best places to see. While there, we noticed a map on the wall with lots of yellow sticky notes:

The sticky notes turned out to be recent bear sightings. We ended up doing the Lost Mine hike, which is relatively short but offers an amazing view of the nearby valleys. As you can see, the hike also was smack dab in the middle of a field of bear-related post-it notes, but we trusted to blind luck and nobody got mauled, not even a little. There was a tense moment where we heard leaves rustling right next to us on the trail – a moment in which we considered whether cacti could be used as a weapon – but it just turned out to be a family of deer.

After catching our breath and cursing Bambi, we continued up the trail and were treated to some spectacular views.

However, the Lost Mine hike is where we discovered one of the iron laws of hiking: if you ever start to feel like a badass, for example by hiking up a mountain full of bears 100 miles south of the middle of nowhere, you will immediately be disabused of that notion. In this case, it was via the couple that passed us, with an infant strapped to their back, hardly breaking a sweat.

We really wanted to ask why you would ever bring a baby to Big Bend, but they seemed like they knew what they were doing. Instead we just had them take a picture of us, shortly before before they continued on the trail and we wussed out and headed back. Thanks guys!

Just Deserts

After a picnic lunch, we headed down out of the mountains and began exploring the rest of the park. Or, at least, the small slice of it we could see in one day. For two people raised in the temperate Northeast, the desert sights were fascinating.

Colorful mountains and cacti!

Endless wilderness!

Road runners! (!!!)

It’s nearly impossible to capture the grandeur and the magic of Big Bend; whatever you’re picturing, it’s much cooler than that.

Unfortunately, we ran into a small, slightly murderous issue. A day that started off comfortably warm, around 70 degrees, continued to grow hotter as the sun progressed across the sky. By mid-afternoon it was approximately 90 degrees, and even though the park is mostly traversed by car, we had spent a deceptively long amount of time walking around at each of the different stops.

Dehydration is always a special concern in the desert, because of the heat and the sun, but it can sneak up on you. Your sweat evaporates so quickly in the intensely dry air that you don’t realize you’re sweating. We had brought two Nalgene bottles full of water, but they were draining at an alarming rate, and the extreme size of the park meant that we were miles away from refilling stations.

Oh, and remember how we mentioned we don’t always super-plan ahead? Yeah, well, it’s normally fine, but every once in a while, it really bites us in the ass. This was one of those times, because we stupidly split a bottle of wine the night before we went to Big Bend. There was probably a good reason for it, like being a Monday, but we were definitely a bit dehydrated before we ever arrived. Combine with the sun and the heat and that oh-so-dry air, and you’re gonna have a bad time.

Well, one of us, anyway. We both have our strengths and weaknesses: Jake doesn’t get blisters or sunburns, and he can open jars, but he’s bad with heights, or anything requiring “stamina” or “dexterity.” Heather is pale like a ghost and can’t reach the top of our cabinets, but she’s graceful and a trooper, and, as it turns out, immune to dehydration. So she continued driving and taking photos of the beautiful landscape, as Jake slowly curled into a ball in the passenger seat.

We did eventually get more water, at one of the park’s campgrounds – after first refilling a bottle from a bathroom faucet with water so awful-tasting, it must not have been potable – but it was a little too late, and things were progressing from bad to worse. Our final stop of the day was the beautiful Santa Elena Canyon, split by the Rio Grande and therefore standing in both the United States and Mexico. Heather wanted to ford the river for more photos, but the shadows were growing long, so we decided to head back.

A Bump In The Night

Just one problem: actually getting back.

You see, the Big Bend scenic drive is about 45 miles long, and although it looks like a loop, the paved part ends at Santa Elena. The final leg of the loop is actually a dirt road, recommended for four-wheel drive cars only, although a ranger had told us regular cars (like our Fit) drive on it all the time. There’s no other exit there, so the only options were to drive an hour back the way we came to the park entrance, or take a short, 12-mile drive over Old Maverick Road, which is unpaved. (lower left on this map)

With Jake feeling really awful, we picked the dirt road. Let us advise you if you ever visit Big Bend and face a similar scenario: do not pick the dirt road. Why, you ask? Well, it’s more like a “loose fist-sized rocks” road, and every single one of the twelve million bumps will (1) cause you to think your tires are going to explode, just like that gas well in Terlingua, leaving you stranded in the desert emptiness; and (2) make your sick passenger’s stomach do flipflops, to the point where you both begin to wonder whether throwing up in a National Park is a violation of federal littering laws.

Oh, and because the road is in such horrible condition, your max speed will be something like 10 miles per hour, meaning that the route is actually slower than just driving back on the well-maintained, non-tire-exploding scenic drive. Except you’re also racing the setting sun, because the only thing more difficult than driving on that spin cycle of a road is doing it in the all-encompassing darkness of night in a desert National Park located 100 miles south of the middle of nowhere.

via GIPHY

Not to spoil the ending, but we did eventually make it out alive, thanks to Heather’s skillful driving, a Honda Fit that didn’t quit, and our old friend, blind luck. Plus, Jake avoided littering in a National Park! Once we made it back to Terlingua, some general store aspirin and Pepto Bismol set him right as rain, and the drive back was smooth sailing (emphasis on smooth).

We finished off a looooong day with food from the Sonic Burger in the big city of Alpine, tired but happy. Big Bend is an extraordinary place, but it will likely be a long time before we go back – which is just fine with Jake.

RECENT NEWS

What’s now: We are leaving Morro Bay to visit Pinnacles National Park. Another notch for the National Parks Pass!

What’s next: We’ve got a few short stays planned, because everything in California is brutally expensive. Monterey (and Big Sur), San Francisco, and then YOSEMITE!

Shamefully missed a prior post? We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you. To see every road trip blog post, click here.

Next Post: Weeks 18-21(ish): Docked in El Paso

March 3, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 17: Tumbling In To Marfa

After a brief stay at the spectacular Caverns of Sonora, and carefully avoiding some crazy flooding, we headed west to our second-to-last Texas destination: Marfa, Texas. Marfa is a tiny town of approximately 2,000 people, located in the west Texas desert, one of the most middle-of-nowhere places you can find in the United States.

The stars on that map represent places we have stayed on our trip, so you can see the Caverns of Sonora to the east and El Paso to the west. We’ll get to the star near Amarillo much later…

You might imagine this to be the most boring drive imaginable, and you wouldn’t be wrong about that. The distances are long, the roads are painfully straight, and the cactus-to-person ratio is unmeasurably high. It’s certainly more relaxing than driving the RV through, say, New Orleans rush hour (protip: never do that), but you quickly run out of things to do. Jake spent his non-driving time holding his phone steady to make sped-up, “hyperlapse” videos of how intensely boring the drive was:

A 16x hyperlapse, so 5 minutes in about 18 seconds.

Another 16x hyperlapse (as best we can remember), driving into the big city of Alpine, Texas (population 6,000).

That said, the drive was still a lot different than we imagined. When we thought of the Texas desert before this trip, we pictured flat, sandy plains. However, one realization we have made from exploring the deserts of the Southwest is that “desert” almost always goes hand-in-hand with “mountains.” Desert scenery is spectacularly mountainous; if you look carefully in the hyperlapses, you can see ridges in the background. In person, the landscape is arrestingly beautiful.

And there is almost never sand. Sometimes we saw grass and trees, like back home. Mostly, Southwestern deserts are scrublands, endless fields of small green bushes atop brown, rocky soil. This makes the mountains stand out even further, and gives new, important meaning to TLC’s 1990s classic, “No Scrubs.”

The other thing worth knowing about the desert is that it is, as a nature documentary would say, a land of “contrasts” and “extremes.” What they mean by that is “it gets really freaking hot during the day, and really cold at night.” With so little humidity, temperature is overwhelmingly driven by the sun. Stand full in its glare, and you’ll be sweating; step three feet away into the shade, and the perceived temperature drops about thirty degrees, just like that. It doesn’t help that Marfa and much of the southwest is at a surprisingly high altitude (see, e.g., Santa Fe), so the temperature swings at night were, umm, rather extreme.

Wear layers.

So, back to Marfa. As we said, it is tiny, consisting of just a few streets and a single stoplight. Marfa historically existed for ranchers and as a stop-over for travelers, and during World War II, there was an Army base there. However, the future of the town took a very unique turn in the 1970s, when minimalist NYC artist Donald Judd began staying and working in Marfa part-time. He ultimately ended up buying huge amounts of property in the area, including the abandoned Army base, and created some stunning works of art in the middle of the desert. Over time, other members of the NYC art scene visited and worked in Marfa.

Today, Marfa still services ranchers and travelers, but it also has numerous museums and galleries. It’s a fun and funky place, with food trucks, an organic grocery store, and a campground named El Cosmico where you can stay in a teepee or a yurt. To the sometimes-consternation of the residents, these things have lead to Marfa becoming increasingly hip: BEYONCE stayed at El Cosmico. It’s really all pretty amazing, although the incongruities can be a bit jarring: for example, seeing a farmer’s dirty, hard-working pickup truck driving behind a gleaming new Escalade was surreal.

We stayed at an adorable RV park called the “Tumble In,” and it was tough to beat the sunsets or the price. If you’re ever just passing through the Chihuahan desert – as we all do, from time to time – it’s well worth a visit.

Since we were in Marfa, we stopped to see some of Judd’s work. Judd converted the Army base into a showcase for his and his friends’ work, installing large sculptures into the existing buildings. For example, three warehouse-sized structures contained a series of beautiful, polished, waist-high aluminum rectangles, each one with different sides and interiors. We weren’t allowed to take pictures of them, but you can see some here. Outside, 15 huge concrete forms – mostly hollow, open-ended cubes – made for silent, geometric guardians in the desert. It was all extremely cool. There was more, including a series of colored light installations set up in former barracks halls, and a downtown warehouse full of sculptures made from crushed cars, but you’ll have to visit Marfa to see them.

We took a day trip outside of Marfa to go hiking in the Davis Mountains, about a half-hour to the north. (Do you like straight, flat roads with no humans? If so, that is the drive for you.) We stopped in to the visitor center to make sure the hiking trails hadn’t been washed away in the recent flooding, and the friendly female worker there assured us they hadn’t. Then, she excitedly told us that the hike was “great” because there was a “huge black rattlesnake” at the top of the mountain we’d be climbing.

“You and I have very different definitions of ‘great,'” Jake said. But we never encountered the rattlesnake, and the hike was a good tune-up for our next adventure: Big Bend National Park (blog post sold separately).

We’re getting slightly ahead of ourselves, but we wanted to show you one more thing near Marfa, since it’s semi-famous for it. (Marfa is also famous for the Marfa Lights, but the night we tried to see them was cloudy, and nothing appeared.) About 20 miles northwest of Marfa, on the way to El Paso, artists created the Prada Marfa store. It’s a fake boutique with some real (but unusable) Prada products inside, all alone in the middle of the desert. It’s a symbol, a prank, and a fantastic photo opportunity, all rolled into one.

RECENT NEWS

What’s now: We are in Morro Bay, California, celebrating Jake’s birthday!

What’s next: We are heading to Pinnacles National Park, followed by some more of coastal California.

Shamefully missed a prior post? We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you. To see every road trip blog post, click here.

Next Post: Week 17.1: Around the Big Bend

February 20, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 16.5: Down Under at the Caverns of Sonora

After playing around in Austin and visiting friends in San Antonio (twice!), it was time to head west, away from the population centers and into the vast Texas desert. Of course, Texas is huge, and since our next stop was about 500 miles away, we decided to stay overnight at a spot we read about online – the Caverns of Sonora. We mostly just needed a place to sleep, and the Caverns have RV parking, so we figured we’d do a little sightseeing and kill two birds with one stone. However, the Caverns turned out to be more spectacular than we ever imagined.

Now, we have visited quite a few caves, so it takes a fair amount to impress us. The Longhorn Caverns we visited near Austin were nifty, and their history is cool, but the cavers were mostly bare rock. There were a handful of cool cave formations – pieces of oddly-shaped rock that look like a fish tail, or a really pretty stalactite, or some cave “popcorn” – but the density wasn’t very high.

At the Caverns of Sonora, on the other hand, all of those cave formations (and many others) were present in extraordinary density. In places, nearly every square inch was covered with something beautiful. It was really incredible, a preposterously dense accumulation of wondrous natural decorations in every imaginable shape, size, and color. There were even thousands of helictites, extremely rare structures in which the rocks grow at crazy and seemingly-impossible angles.

The photo above is from a section dubbed the “Snake Pit,” and there are more helictites in that picture alone than in all but a handful of caves in the entire world. But as we said, that’s not all you can find in the Caverns of Sonora. Here’s one of our favorite cave decorations: cave bacon!

By the way, we had planned to shoehorn this visit into our previous post, but once we started looking through our pictures again, we just couldn’t do it. The Caverns are a magical place, and it deserves a little extra love. So, we’re going to eschew our usual format, and just take you along as we show off some of what we saw there. Unfortunately, the pictures don’t really do it justice, since caves are dark (and we’re amateur photographers at best), but hopefully you’ll enjoy!

Magical Mystery Tour

We stayed overnight at the Caverns, so we were in the first tour group the next morning. That group turned out to consist of… us, and a tour guide. We therefore ended up getting our own personal tour of the Caverns, a rare pleasure which we certainly appreciated. We got to go at our own pace, and as introverts, it was satisfying to walk through the underground beauty mostly in silence.

The Caverns grow grander as you descend. Near the beginning of our tour, the walls were still visible, with some cave decorations visible.

The most noticeable decoration is cave popcorn, which looks like exactly what it sounds like. It’s rock, but it’s bright white in comparison to the other decorations, and amazingly fluffy looking.

We continued to descend. In some places, the walls were lined with cave popcorn. The air inside the caves was warm – it’s a constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit inside – but moist.

The cave decorations became denser as we descended. Stalagmites and stalactites, covered with what looked from a distance like carpet. Up close, the bumps revealed themselves to be millions upon millions of tiny formations.

Soon, every step was past a wall bursting with beautiful formations. Everything in the Caverns is just a different shade of the same off-white, porcelain color, but no less arresting for it. Candles, pine trees, snowflakes – your brain cannot help but see patterns in the chaotic depths.

This is Nature’s sculpture garden, an infinite gallery of mineralogical wonder, and we were a guest on her tour.

Our tour guide shows us an underground pond, so crystal-clear it is nearly invisible. In places, this pond is one hundred feet deep. It takes decades for water to reach it from the surface.

Soda Straws: long, delicate tendrils, like skinny icicles, hanging down from the ceiling. It feels like the slightest breeze would destroy them all; but of course, there is no wind this deep underground.

Soda straws soon surrounded us, like a rainstorm frozen in flight. Mounds of flowstone covered the ground, lumpy like mashed potatoes, or dripping candle wax. (There’s more in the gallery slideshow.)

Near the bottom of the caverns, we entered the “Hall of the White Giants,” so named for its huge white rock formations. (We aren’t 100% certain, but believe it was the area below.) Our tour guide told us that because of the delicacy of the formations in this area, groups are only taken into to see the white giants about once every 4 months.

In fact, because the area is so active and the decorations continue to grow, the opening to the Hall of the White Giants is slowly being closed by nature. We are lucky and humbled to have seen it before it is gone for good.

Towards the end of our nearly two-hour tour, we became almost numb to the crazy beauty on display all around us. For the same reason, we will not try to show you all of our favorites, but we put together a slideshow below with a few more you may enjoy.

As we ascended, we passed again through layers of different types of formations. Near the top, the walls changed to a smooth, white limestone. Like everything else in the Caverns, it was beautiful.

After such a magical journey, returning to the regular world was jarring. We finally re-emerged into the Texas morning sunlight, blinking, and struggling to capture what we had just seen. We have been lucky enough to see many wondrous things on our trip, but few can compete with the Caverns of Sonora.

We thought that was it for our tour, but as we headed back to the gift shop, there was one final surprise in store for us: peacocks!

It was an unforgettable experience. If you’re ever in the area, we strongly suggest you visit!

RECENT NEWS

What’s now: We are recovering from our hike up to the awesome Potato Chip Rock!

What’s next: We are leaving San Diego shortly to try to catch the most incongruous of events: wildflowers blooming in Death Valley. Then, we’re doubling down in Vegas, baby!

Shamefully missed a prior post? We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you. To see every road trip blog post, click here.

Next Post: Week 17: Tumbling In To Marfa

February 12, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 16: Adult Distractions in Austin

After much fun in San Antonio, we departed to spend a few days checking out Austin – a city high on our pre-trip list of “places we might live.” We certainly found a lot to like there, and in some ways, the city was really cool. Unfortunately, it was less cool in other, more literal ways. Austin was brutally hot while we were there, with record temperatures for mid-October in the mid-90’s (and humid).

Weather aside, we had a great time exploring Austin, and it’s definitely on our list of places to visit again.

Straight and Narrow Sprawl

Since we’ve been driving everywhere, we’ve come to notice and appreciate (usually) the little quirks in the roadways in different areas. Vermont had endless rolling hills, while Louisiana’s highways were built on incredibly long, flat, straight bridges through the bayou. The West Texas desert had beautiful, perfectly-maintained roads, while the roads in Southern California are in such bad shape they sometimes seem closer to gravel. In New Mexico, you can sometimes go 20 miles at a time without a curve in the road. You get the idea.

Well, one Texas quirk is that the highways leading in and out of the cities tend to be lined with businesses for miles and miles, long past where people actually live. They are typically clustered right by the highway on frontage roads (another Texas quirk – they love frontage roads), with giant billboards every few feet, but there’s nothing at all behind them. A mile wide and an inch deep, you might say, and nowhere was it more apparent than on the drive between Austin and San Antonio.

The drive between the cities is relatively short, about an hour and a half in our RV, but it’s pretty empty, population-wise, by the time you get to the midpoint. Except… the businesses never really stopped. There were no towns, not even really houses, but still, we drove past an endless row of billboards and fast food joints and mechanics and car dealerships and gas stations and everything else you can think of. It was definitely a unique experience for us, since we grew up where trees cover everything and the towns have gaps between them. But hey – seeing new things is why we’re on this trip!

We Missed You, Nature

We met up with friends in Houston and San Antonio, and although we were excited to show our RV off to them, the RV parks we were staying in at the time weren’t ideal. They were cramped, with neighbors parked as close as possible to each other, and very little in the way of trees or shade. Unfortunately, this is a fairly common occurrence, especially close to big cities, where space is at a premium. Houston was particularly bad, since there was almost nothing by way of nature around to see.

That’s why we’re happy to say that our campground near Austin was awesome. Like all of our favorite spots, it was located in a park, not a commercial RV campground, and it was gorgeous. We had a spacious, shady spot underneath the trees, completely surrounded by vegetation so it was utterly private. (First picture in the slideshow below.) Plus, we were still quite close to Austin! We have stayed in all sorts of places on our trip so far, but McKinney Falls State Park remains one of our favorites, even if the falls were non-existent when we were there.

Going Downtown With Burt Reynolds

Austin is known as a very fun city, and it definitely lived up to its reputation. On our first day in town, our friend Brian was visiting as well, so we wandered around downtown and stopped in at a random local bar, called HandleBar. It turned out to be a wise choice, as we got to enjoy a friendly bartender, great beers, many mustache-related decorations, and a rooftop full of “adult distractions,” like a see-saw and giant Jenga blocks. Drinking and toys? Sign us up.

After a while, we headed downstairs and checked out the back room. There were pinball machines, a vending machine selling fake mustaches, and best and weirdest of all, a giant picture of Burt Reynolds lying naked on a bearskin rug. Crazily enough, that was the second time we had seen that picture in a bar in about three days. At our friend’s wedding afterparty in a swanky nightclub just a few days before, the ladies’ room also featured a giant picture of Burt Reynolds lying naked on a bearskin rug, except that one was backlit!

Burt Reynolds – still going strong in central Texas.

There are a lot of other cool things to do in the city as well, but we didn’t have time for much. The live music scene is famous, and we are happy to report that it was going strong when we visited. Nearly every bar featured a band of some kind, even on a Thursday night.

We stopped for some tacos at the original Torchy’s Tacos, which started as a food truck before becoming a successful (and insanely delicious) local chain. Note the jugs of water in the photo below – they were giving it out to people standing in line so nobody died from the heat!

Mmmm, Red Planet

We also caught a film at the Alamo Drafthouse, another local Austin business that has hit it big. The Drafthouse is a pretty awesome place to see a movie, with unique promos they create and show in place of previews; we saw The Martian, and they showed very entertaining parts of so-bad-its-good Mars-themed B-movies. This was followed by an amazing montage of people chowing down in competitive eating contests, with the audio track replaced by soaring speeches about going to space and achieving human greatness. 5 stars for the juxtaposition alone!

Speaking of eating, the Alamo Drafthouse serves food and drinks, including beer, delivered at any time during the movie. You simply place a note in a little stand in front of your own personal table, and black-clad ushers quickly quietly bring whatever you ordered without disturbing the other patrons. So while Matt Damon was almost starving to death on Mars, we were sipping some frosty, freshly-made peanut butter-chocolate milkshakes. How’s THAT for a juxtaposition?

via GIPHY

Texas Cave Country

Our final destination in Texas was the Longhorn Caverns, a series of gorgeous caves in Texas Hill Country with an interesting backstory. This area is beautiful, by the way, with endless rolling hills, more greenery than you’d expect, and interesting scenery around every turn. The Longhorn Caverns themselves have seen many uses, serving variously as a Native American meeting place, a hideout for bandits, and a tourism destination – sometimes at the same time.

Later, during Prohibition, a stage was built in the largest cavern, and it housed a popular speakeasy and restaurant. That ended with Prohibition, but, in the 1930s, the caverns were renovated by the Civilian Conservation Corps into their present form. As we understand it, this “renovation” was primarily about “removing a million boulders by hand,” so we’re grateful as always to the formerly-young men of the CCC. (If you’re not familiar with the program, it’s worth reading about. Probably half of the parks we’ve visited were improved by the CCC!)

Nowadays, you can tour the caves, have dinner and get married on the stage, and maybe even hide out from law enforcement. We opted for the first one (with a little bit of the third), and the Longhorn Caverns were quite a spectacle, although they paled in comparison to our next stop. It didn’t hurt that we had a fantastic tour guide, a former drill sergeant whose love of showing off the features of the cave was second only to his love of intensely bad puns.

He really rocked.



			
			
			
				 				 
				
					

					One of the buildings constructed by the CCC, made out of rock quarried from the park.


	
	

				
				
					

					Modern entrance to the caverns. During the prohibition, smaller entrances through the "ceiling" were used.


	
	

				
				
					

					 


	
	

				
				
					

					The walls are covered with quartz crystals.


	
	

				
				
					

					A non-blurry photo of the quartz crystals.


	
	

				
				
					

					 


	
	

				
				
					

					"Waterfall" rock formation.


	
	

				
				
					

					This is not a sculpture of a dog. This is supposedly a naturally formed rock formation!


	
	

				
				
					

					The main room, where they got their party on during the prohibition. Today, concerts and weddings are held here. There are great acoustics in this room.


	
	

				
				
					

					These smooth limestone walls were carved millions of years ago by underground streams.

RECENT NEWS

What’s now: We immediately extended our stay in San Diego because weather.

What’s next: Heather is still trying to make us leave San Diego to try to catch the wildflowers blooming in Death Valley.

Shamefully missed a prior post? We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you. To see every road trip blog post, click here.

Next Post: Week 16.5: Down Under at the Caverns of Sonora

February 10, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 15.5: Texas Tourism in San Antonio

Heading west from Houston, we made it to San Antonio in just a few hours. If you’re like us, you might picture this part of Texas as a desert, but it’s actually still quite green, in a scrublands sort of way. And humid! And very, very hot. In fact, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin are all surprisingly, unpleasantly humid and hot, which is why air conditioners are mankind’s greatest invention.

But the people are friendly, and your dollar goes far. Despite the proliferation of cowboy boots and some unfortunate dining experiences, we certainly had a good time. Enough chit-chat; on to the post!

Heading: Wedding

The first item on our agenda in San Antonio was the wedding of our friends, Danny and Rose. This was the only event on our calendar for quite a while, and it drove a lot of our planning to this point, so we’re happy to say we made it on time. The ceremony and reception were lovely, held in a beautiful Japanese tea garden on a hot-fading-to-pleasant October evening. We had a blast, especially since lots of our friends came into town for the wedding.

You can see a few pictures below. Apologies for the qualities of the photos in this post – because we were out and about with friends, they were mostly taken on a phone.

Remembering The Alamo

If you know one thing about San Antonio, you probably know that it is the location of the Alamo. But if you haven’t visited, you may not know that the Alamo is actually in the city, not far from the Riverwalk (discussed below). It’s really quite small, the size of an old Mission church surrounded by walls, which is basically what it was.

As you can see in the picture, there was quite a line, so we decided to skip going inside at first, and instead went to check out the surrounding grounds. There was a museum playing a (b-roll) History Channel documentary on loop, and it also contained some unnervingly strange Alamo-related paraphernalia – including a lock of Davy Crockett’s hair. Why does that exist, and more importantly, who decided it needed to be displayed at the Alamo museum?

Semi-Factual Sidebar

The Battle of the Alamo was fought in 1836 after Texas declared its independence from Mexico. Mexico sent an army into Texas to return the wayward state to the fold, and about 250 “Texian” soldiers were overrun by the Mexican army at the Alamo. The Texians were all killed, even the famous ones like Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, because Twitter follower accounts could not easily be verified back then. The non-Alamo Texians then banded together, defeated the Mexican army, and captured the President of Mexico (who was personally leading the army – rookie mistake). A new country was created and absorbed by the U.S., yadda yadda yadda, oversized belt buckles and cowboy boots.

The line we showed you before eventually disappeared, and we entered the main attraction: the “Shrine to Texas Liberty.” The Shrine was under construction when we were there, so instead of entering via an historic door, we ducked under a tarp. There wasn’t a lot going on inside; the most impressive part of the Alamo may be the gift shop, which was probably larger than either the museum or the Shrine.

That feels right, somehow, because the Alamo is really just a huge tourist trap. Right outside the doors (or tarp), we spotted a Ripley’s Believe It or Not, a wax museum, and several funnel cake stands – a holy trinity of touristry. Not really our cup of tea. (Not to say funnel cakes aren’t delicious. But we don’t put them in our tea.) (Although… maybe we should try that.)

Eating In A Restaurant Down By The River

We said that if you know one thing about San Antonio, you probably know that about the Alamo. Well, if you know TWO things about San Antonio, you probably know about the Riverwalk. The Riverwalk is actually a pretty cool idea – a walkway along the banks of the river, featuring hotels, restaurants, bars, and shops, live music, and even police boats (!!!). It’s very well-trafficked, but we question the implementation; for one, some of the restaurants are horrible (keep reading), and second, the river is kind of gross.

It doesn’t smell, really, but the water is noticeably green. Like “the Chicago river on St. Patrick’s Day” green, or “pond you would never want to go swimming in” green. It’s not very photogenic, and frankly a little concerning, sanitation-wise. So although some of the shops and restaurants were quite nice, the overall experience doesn’t reach its full potential, even though we had fun there.

We will admit that the river does look very pretty at night (photo from Wikimedia, because we were too busy drinking to take our own). Speaking of drinking, we have to wonder: how many drunk people have fallen into that water? And how many times would you have to shower afterwards to feel clean again?

The morning after the wedding, a hung-over group of ourselves and our friends walked along the Riverwalk to get some brunch. There were a ton of options, and we tried to pick one using Yelp, but we got lost on the way there. We ended up just picking the Mexican restaurant we were standing in front of when we realized we were lost, and this turned out to be a mistake. Friends, we think this may have been the worst restaurant we’ve ever been to in our lives. The location was nice, but the food and service were… unique.

Our waiter was very friendly, possibly a recovering or current drug addict, and strangely honest about his poor service. Our friend Kate ordered water with lime. “I think you mean with lemon,” our waiter said, and when she again stated her preference for a lime, he proceeded to argue with her about it. Limes were all the way upstairs at the bar, the waiter explained, and so it wasn’t really worth the hassle for him. Kate finally agreed to lemons instead, which he then forget to bring for about 45 minutes. The waiter then brought a handful of cut limes – literally in his hands – and politely dropped them on her plate.

After we got our food, Kate then made the mistake of requesting some green salsa (the same green salsa that was on about half of the plates at our table). Our waiter, never one to miss a haggling opportunity, counter-offered with red salsa instead. Kate stuck to her guns, though, and although it seemed like this was going to turn into a Texas “pistols at dawn”-style duel, the waiter eventually stood down and acceded to her minor request.

It was certainly one-of-a-kind service. A Yelp review we read later said that while the reviewer was waiting forever for their food (happened to us also), they had this entertaining scene unfold:

“We ordered drinks and never saw our server again. While we were waiting we saw another server drop an entire tray of food on the floor. This isn’t really a big deal, except that the server then just walked away without picking anything up. The spilled food sat on the floor going on 20 minutes without being cleaned up. While drafting this review, another server was walking to a table and slipped and fell on the food and broken dishes which still had not been picked up. After another 5 minutes it was finally cleaned up.”

Speaking of the food, real Mexican food is delicious and flavorful. This was like Mexican food as made by your middle-school cafeteria, except without the chocolate chip cookie alternatives. The taste actually wasn’t even the worst (or best?) part: check out the menu, which features some pretty amazing “Spanish” phrases:

Look at the names of those menu options! Our favorite is a tossup between “Burrito de Certified Angus Beef Fajita,” which doesn’t even really make sense, and “Burrito de Bean and Cheese,” which is some truly lazy translating.

We will say this: it was certainly a memorable dining experience.

#JustTexasThings

It may not seem like it based on our descriptions of the Riverwalk and the Alamo, but we had a really good time in San Antonio – twice, in fact. After everyone left, we headed to Austin for a week, which we will get to next. We then came back for a few days and hung out with the newlyweds, Danny and Rose, since they weren’t leaving on honeymoon for a while. Their house has dogs, a big screen TV, and amazing barbecue, which is always a winning combination, but we also got to do some things with a more “local” flavor. One highlight was dinner at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that serves incredible – and incredibly huge – hamburgers. We were full after splitting the medium size burger (see below) – they go up to at least three pounds! (No word on whether they were made with Certified Angus Beef.)

Besides cramming meat down your gullet as fast as possible, what do you do in Texas? Shoot off some guns, that’s what! Since Danny owns a small arsenal – as required by law of all Texas residents – we headed to the range and blasted some targets. It was Heather’s first time shooting a gun, but she did pretty well, even with Danny’s “I can’t believe you get to own this” AR-15.

Jake also had some fun (sporting one of his shirts from the Jake Fischer collection).

RECENT NEWS

What’s now: We’re in San Diego, and the weather is amazing. Jake doesn’t want to leave.

What’s next: Heather is going to make us leave San Diego to try to catch the wildflowers blooming in Death Valley.

Shamefully missed a prior post? We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you. To see every road trip blog post, click here.

Next Post: Week 16: Adult Distractions in Austin

February 4, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 15: Rocketing Through Houston

In early October, we left the small town of Sulphur, Louisiana and headed west. It didn’t take long until we made it to Texas – exit 878 on I-10, to be exact (numbered by mile). Jake texted his mom, who lives in El Paso, to let her know we had finally made it to the State That Shall Not Be Messed With. “Cool!” She replied. “See you at exit 13.”

Yes, Texas is a big state, and it would take us the entire month of October to travel those remaining 865 miles to El Paso. Our first stop was a quick 3 days in Houston, a hot, humid, concrete jungle with a surprisingly good (and nerdy) vibe.

Blast-Off

While Houston’s downtown seems to be mostly corporate headquarters, it does have quite a few interesting museums. With only a short amount of time to work with, we decided to visit the most iconic (and the one not actually downtown) the Johnson Space Center. It’s the home of rockets, astronauts, and NASA mission control, and it’s fun for the whole family!

A little too fun, if we’re being honest. The day we visited turned out to be Homeschooled Kids Day, and everywhere we went was overrun with swarms of young children. Sometimes it was kind of cute, watching them fill out their field trip homework forms under their mother’s watchful eye, but mostly it was just clogged up.

Replica Space Shuttle at the NASA Houston Space Center.

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on Oct 8, 2015 at 11:30am PDT

Ahhh, the peaceful few minutes of walking in the parking lot before we discovered it was Homeschooler Day. By the way, you can actually tour the inside of this space shuttle today! Unfortunately, it was still under construction during our visit.

Because of all the youngsters, we had to ride the line ride for about an hour to take a tour of the grounds, but it was worth it. One of the stops is the mission control room as it existed in 1969, complete with old-school computers and a red phone that connects straight to the Pentagon (although probably not anymore). NASA monitored nine Gemini and all Apollo missions, including the moon landing, right in that room.

Check out the slideshow below for some pictures. We’re testing this out as a replacement for the galleries, which had some big problems on mobile devices – let us know what you think!

We sat in the front row of the observation room, a room where several heads of state have sat in the past. It’s pretty cool to think that we may have placed our butts into the same seat that Queen Elizabeth, JFK, Nixon, Lassie, etc. once sat on.

The current mission control room is actually directly underneath the old one. Doesn’t seem like the safest place to put it to us, but hey, we’re not the scientists.

via GIPHY

The rest of the tour was pretty interesting, too. The Space Center is a sprawling campus of weird NASA-related stuff, the kind of place where very large vats of liquid nitrogen just “chill” on the corner of the block. We made a stop at a gigantic hangar, which turned out to contain an unused Saturn V rocket – the booster rockets that propelled mankind to the moon. It was scheduled to be used for Apollo 18, but that flight was cancelled, and so now it is on display at the Johnson Space Center.

The scale of the rocket is frankly incredible. It’s hard to do it justice in a single photo, but it sits in a room the size of an indoor arena or field house and fills it completely. The sections are broken apart so you can peer inside various components, and although every inch of the casing is covered with wiring and tubing, it’s basically hollow inside.

Except for the rocket fuel, of course.

Can you imagine strapping yourself to one of these and blasting off to the moon?

We also got to take a peek at the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility, an even-more-massive room filled with a replica of everything astronauts might interact with in space, including a mockup of the International Space Station. We also spotted replica space capsules, such as the Russian Soyuz, and even a SpaceX Dragon. So cool! (Luckily, the Nerd Alert is flashing continuously there, so nobody noticed us geeking out.)

There was also a pretty cool museum which was, for some reason, partially sponsored by Angry Birds. Animals in space – what a perfectly thin excuse for one of our favorite gifs!

via GIPHY

If you’re interested further, you can take a look at the slideshow below for some snaps from the museum. We got to touch moon rocks! And view a life-size astronaut mannequin in the space shower (that circular tube thing), which probably wasn’t necessary.

Old Friends, Nerd Places

Despite the fact that neither of us had ever really been there before, Houston was a great place to go to meet up with old friends. Our friend Brian works in New York, but has been getting sent to Houston every week by his work for months, so we got to hang out. We were happy to get the chance to play some board games (there’s that Nerd Alert again), enjoy the first of what would turn out to be roughly 92 straight Tex-Mex meals, and hitch a ride in his Ubers.

We also met up with our friends Sean and Maggie. Maggie moved to Houston last summer to work for the Houston Chronicle, presumably so she could write hard-hitting pieces like “Moody Gardens turtles predict Super Bowl 50 winner.” (Sorry Maggie! In fairness, she also wrote this beautiful essay.) As it happened, Sean was visiting her one of the nights we were in town.

We all met up at the most gloriously nerdy bar we have ever been to in our lives (noticing a theme?), Neil’s Bahr. There were board games for the bar patrons to play, which isn’t that unusual, as well as video games, including a “vintage N64,” which is a bit more unusual. There were comic books available for people to read, and one TV played nothing but the Simpsons 24/7, which is always a good idea. Mostly, though, it was the people inside who brought it down (or up?), such as the guy who visited while dressed up as a Ninja Turtle (it’s his “thing,” he said), or the two geeky-looking guys at the table next to ours. Their geeky looks weren’t just for show: they were, in fact, building a model Millenium Falcon on the table. At a bar. While arguing about the Star Wars extended universe.

Sorry, ladies, we did not get their phone numbers.

RECENT NEWS

What’s now: Doing some Los Angeles sightseeing. The weather is great, the traffic is less so.

What’s next: Heading to San Diego for a week, then hopefully up to Las Vegas and Death Valley. This would all feel more satisfying if winter had not decided to skip the Northeast this year.

Shamefully missed a prior post? We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you. To see every road trip blog post, click here.

Next Post: Week 15.5: Texas Tourism in San Antonio