Day 8 - Desert Willow RV Park & Margie's Bakery (Van Horn), Carlsbad Caverns and Cottonwood Wine and Brewery.

Woke up from a great nights sleep at Desert Willow RV Park in Van Horn.  Using my Passport America membership we paid only $12.50 for the night!  A steal for a full service campground.  With clean laundry, a full freshwater tank and empty black and gray tanks we are ready for another 4 or 5 days staying cheap somewhere.  One little tip to remember, keep plenty of quarters in your RV for laundries.  We checked in after hours and luckily had enough to do our laundry.  

One other little tidbit of advice, be careful spraying aerosols in a small RV, the propellant might set off your propane detector.  We found that out today the loud way, our detector works!

All loaded up and ready to go we are going to stop in town at Debra's favorite 

little restaurant in this part of Texas, Margie's Bakery.

After a wonderful meal we set our sights northward to our next destination, Carlsbad Caverns.  We did

not see the bats, that would have been really exciting!  We did have a blast walking through the caves, we did take the easy way down and rode the elevator.  It is a strange experience going into the cavern if you have never done it before.  It is kind of cool, but the humidity is high, it is dark even with all the lighting.  But that helps you see all the cool shadows and odd shapes.

 

After leaving the Cavern we continued our path north to Artesia and pulled into the Cottonwood Wine and Brewery.  They are members of Boondockerswelcome and welcomed us to spend the night at their winery.  We bought a bottle of  Chardonnay from them to enjoy later on.  They told us were we could buy some steaks to cook for dinner, a local store called Gregg's Food.  We headed there and picked up two steaks.

Day 7 - Fort Lancaster & Fort Davis and Marfa, TX

Left the Sonora TX Safety Rest Area at 7:50 am with Fort Lancaster in our sights.  Had a great nights sleep, woke up to bunch of other vehicles that also spent the night there.  We stopped at the scenic overlook and our way to the fort, here is a short video showing the fort in the distance.

Driving down the mountain we reached Fort Lancaster, it is just ruins now, but it is easy to visualize the way it once looked. The Ranger gave us a golf cart to ride around on and see the ruins.

After touring the ruins we headed to Fort Davis to tour some ruins as well as some restored structures.  Fort Davis is an amazing place to visit, the restored structures are very well done and show how life was back then.  

I will have to create some videos for both Fort Lancaster and Fort Davis at a later date, my PC is having some video editing issues now.

From Fort Davis we headed to Marfa, TX and enjoyed lunch at Mando's Restaurant & bar, it was very good.  We drove around Marfa and here are some of the photos we took.

Back on the road and heading to our next stop, Van Horn, TX.  I found the Willows RV park on Passport America and will have full hookups for $12.50!  We arrived in time for Debra to a much needed laundry visit!  After a couple of nice, warm showers and dinner Debra made it time for bed.

Here is a video I made about my receiver hitch so I can use a locking hitch pin.

Day 6, still in Texas!

Being in this part of Texas and not stopping by Luckenbach would be crazy, especially for me!  It was a really unusual place to see, kind of what I expected but at the same time not really what I expected.

On one of the door frames bar/post office/general store were a bunch of law enforcement shoulder patches, one of them really caught me attention.

From there we headed to Johnson City to see Lyndon B Johnson's childhood home.  We had a guided tour of the home that was very informative.  It was nice to see the home restored to how it would have looked when LBJ lived there.

This is an interesting print, look really close and what do you see?

I like the chamber pot under the bed, that is how it really was for
many people in our country not that long ago. 

From here we visited Lyndon B Johnson's ranch.  Here is Debra standing next to what they call "Air Force One-Half", it's very small compared to what the president flies in today.  But then again, those were much different times.

Our Roadtrek looks a wee bit tiny when sitting next to a bus.

We left the ranch and started westward again, we were in the hill section of Texas and started seeing many wineries and garden stores.  We stopped at Wildseed Farms and stretched our legs some.

We parked next to another Class B that was in the lot,.  We met them a little later on, nice folks.

This cat was extremely happy resting in a bed of Catnip!

We returned to I-10 and drove until dark, not many choices to park for the night.  We saw on one of our apps, RVParky, the Senora TX Safety Rest Area around mile marker 393.  We pulled in for a safe nights sleep along with several other RV's

 and a bunch of 18 wheelers.