VIP

We had a VIP come to visit this week. Sara's mother Debra flew into El Paso on Tuesday and flew out on Saturday. Wednesday morning the desert welcomed Debra with a stunning orange sunrise.

Since we only had a couple of full days to show her around, we tried to pack in as much as we could. First stop had to be the Big Bend National Park. The national park was beautiful and almost every plant was blooming, thanks to recent and copious rain. But a lot of the roads we wanted to travel were closed due to washouts.

Despite that setback, we managed to see a number of great spots,including the Chisos basin, the Ross Maxwell scenic drive, Castolon, the Rio, and Santa Elena canyon. Debby got to take a photo of her first wild tarantula and discovered that she loves ocotillo plants, despite having trouble remembering the name.

The next day we gave her the two-dollar tour of Terlingua ghost-town, took a stroll through the graveyard, and tried to find something worth buying at the Terlingua Trading Company. Unfortunately, we were treated very rudely by the man behind the counter and did not buy anything.

Just a few miles down the road, we had a completely opposite experience at the Lajitas resort. The posh resort, which basically is its own town, sits right on the Rio Grande and boasts many amenities and luxuries for its guests. After checking out the wares at Christina's World, we were strolling down the boardwalk when an employee came out to greet us. We thought that he was going to ask us to take the dogs away, but instead he enthusiastically greeted the dogs first and suggested we take them over to the amphitheater where they could play off-leash.

He gave us a mini-tour of the resort while guiding us to the amphitheater  and told us we were welcome to eat at the restaurant with the dogs if we didn't mind sitting outside. With a veranda like this, who could mind?

But we had already planned to eat at the Starlight Theater, so when we were done exploring the resort we all piled back into the truck and had a very nice meal accompanied by live music.

All in all, I think we did OK as far as giving the whirlwind-tour. Let us know if we missed any of your favorites -- we'll add them to the list for next time.

Staying warm

Brrr. The winds kicked up something awful yesterday evening, and it sounded like the end of the world most of the night.  We woke up to temps in the 40s, and cold fog sitting heavy on the mountains.

After coffee and morning chores, we loaded up Deb's bicycle-powered water pump for delivery.  She seemed pleased with the end result.  We look forward to hearing how it performs.

While at TFL we also got to see Stacy's rocket stove, which is like a mini-gasifier. By using a metal chimney and a small inlet orifice, you can create lots of concentrated heat for cooking, with just a few twigs.  It makes cooking with wood so much more efficient.  To learn more about wood gasification, follow the link to our website.

la bomba bicicleta

Had a great visit with Dr. Deb and her friend Stacy, who drove out to Terlingua from East Texas.  They are staying at le Chateau TFL, and came by to have us fabricate a bicycle water pump. Got to give them a tour of the homestead, too.  It turns out that Deb's a whiz at ferro-cement, and had lots of questions about the Presidio Gallena.

We recently got this nifty little band saw for cutting metal, and now we don't know how we got on without one for so long.  It makes the whole process more precise and less dramatic (we had been using a chop saw with an abrasive disk).

 

The mercury is supposed to drop tonight and into the next couple days with a big cold front that's moving in, but today was just perfect.