Bonus Chapter 3: Easter in the Middle of Nowhere
I thought y’all were in Texas.
How’d you get up into Oklahoma so quickly?
I have to confess, we hadn’t originally wanted to spend a full day and a second night in Fort Davis.
I’m shocked… Shocked to hear this.
However, the resort was booked up due to the holiday weekend
Danged human masses…
Aren’t those other people aware that the holidays are the only time we can travel and so that ought to stay home and out of our way?
I mean…
The nerve of some folk.
Our home in Fort Davis was the Indian Lodge in Fort Davis State Park
Had no idea that was there,
See, now this is why we travel.
Well, it’s why we ought to travel; I just keep not being able to accomplish the task.
…built in the 1930’s by the Civilian Conservation Corps
There were a whole lot of really surprising things built by the CCC before it was declared unconstitutional.
It was fairly basic, as state park accommodations generally are, but was a nice place to stay and offered much nicer views than your average roadside motel.
So, not a Super-8, then?
(and hopefully not a super-fund site either)
As always, the boys begged to be allowed to swim in the hotel pool, since hotel pools have magical properties that draw young boys to them like internet comments sections draw people who should never be allowed near a computer.
But of course!
I have vivid memories of nearly every dinky, poorly maintained, way over chlorinated motel pool that we ever encountered. I can almost taste that water just thinking about it.
Oh, and I probably should never be allowed anywhere near a computer as well.
Coincidence?
Fearing hypothermia, we were the bad guys and said no.
Not sure if we were ever told no…
The benefits of exhausted kids, tended to beat out considerations of bodily injury.
Besides, back then, kids were pretty much a disposable commodity.
You could just make more.
The hotel also had a nice little game room. You could borrow board games and take them back to your room, or just hang out there, hoping the dodgy wi-fi would hold on long enough for you to send an email.
Now, that’s pretty cool.
And I like the added feature of dodgy wi-fi.
With that going for us, I might be able to get everyone to actually sit down and play one of those games.
Unfortunately, none of the flyers informed us when the service was actually supposed to start. But, using our formidable deductive-reasoning skills, we figured it most likely started at sunrise.
And that’s why we pay for them there college ed-u-ma-cations.
Naturally, a dusty and rarely-used portion of my brain…
Wouldn’t that be pretty much all of it?
(would be in my case, at least)
Drew’s favorite spot was the corner where kids could dress up as soldiers
Like you weren’t fighting with him over the best bits of garb pretending to be the Waco Kid…
and carry around what he refers to as “a shooting gun”.
So close…
Get him to drop the “g” off the end of that middle word there and he’ll be well on his way to speaking proper South’rn.
The entire movie about this barely noteworthy fort in the middle of nowhere was narrated by former L.A. Lakers basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Come on now…
You were just pulling my lariat.
Right?
He even wore full western cowboy gear for his on-camera appearances and played the whole thing deadly straight.
Completely reasonable…
Just coming off his award winning role as Rodger Murdock, I couldn’t think of a more plausible choise for his next film appearance.
Please tell me there is a copy of this somewhere out there on the internets.
“This sound like the worst movie in the history of movies. Like, even worse than The English Patient. Why would anyone agree to this?”
Truer word have never been spoken.
“You can dress up like a cowboy.”
“YES! GET ME ON A PLANE!”
I’m teiin’ ya’.
Nearly anyone would go out of their way to pretend to be the Sheriff Bart or the Waco Kid.
It was like hiring a TV chef to narrate your office Human Resources videos.
Irish-ka vish-la retirement planish’ka point a fish-ka-lavin com-ta chose-tra-niv-ish ah…
Of course, this meant my mom had to read every single sign about every single piece of furniture.
I’ve got a relative with this same affliction…
Now, just for the sake of argument, imagine this same scenario bring played out, but it also just so happened that your first stop of the day randomly ended up being the rock and mineral section of one of the Smithsonian museums on the National Mall…
Taps foot…
Looks at watch…
Breaths deep sigh…
Look at watch again…
Bless her heart.
We got a photo of us all in our slightly-less-casual Easter finery.
Christmas card Photo!
The sheer randomness of the location and background makes this epic.
(Not to mention that it even shows Drew almost lookin’ in the right direction. Almost…)
After an Easter feast of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches…
Better than peanut-butter-and-jellybean sandwiches.
we moved on to our afternoon attraction: the McDonald Observatory. Being in the middle of nowhere, the Davis Mountains get terrifically dark night skies.
And here is an actual irrefutable good reason to stop in Fort Davis.
My parents left to take Drew back to the hotel for a nap.
Another check mark on their application for the Prenatal Medal of Valor
Shortly afterwards, the clouds began to roll in.
Dang It! So much for good reasons.
Ran into that problem on the 21st.
Luckily we were able to call an audible and move to a better local.
Our guide arrived and greeted us. He introduced himself as Nerdy McDronerson, Ph. D…
I’ve met that guy.
He’s.. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
We all sat and fidgeted in our seats as Dr. McDronerson delivered a masterful doctoral dissertation on the sun, explaining the intricacies of quasi-periodic vertical oscillatory motion and detection while observing the macroscopic line-of-sight velocity and taking into account the chromosphere through their correlation coefficients and temperature fluctuations of solar flares sending propagating waves affecting the flux capacitor’s readings of isolated Pythagorean Theorem calculations that average out through…
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
molecular deconstruction of soylent green particles as explained by Newton’s Law…
Wait, waaaa?
and the appearance of both Khyber and dilithium crystals, notwithstanding the azimuth of the arc reactor…
Really? Khyber Chrystals? Without implementing force levitation?
Look, I have no idea what he said. All I know is, I’m an engineer. Science and technology are my thing. And at some point, my brain switched over to the channel where I score the game-winning goal in game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals, much like the dad in Inside Out.
The foot is down!
The foot is down!
…but in the meantime he handed my kids the controls to multi-million dollar pieces of research equipment.
Scotty: “Let’s see… Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Select Start… Yes! I’m in!”
We somehow managed to escape without destroying anything, and moved on to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope building. This telescope is much newer, larger, more expensive, and can see much farther into space. They didn’t let us touch anything in there.
Can’t imagine why that would be…
By the time we staggered out of that building, we checked our watches and realized that it had been a full three hour tour. A three hour tour…
The weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed…
The owners of this place clearly had a sense of humor, which as you know always bumps a joint up a couple of letter grades in my book. We were about to find out how much of a sense of humor they had.
I like the strategic positioning of the pain relievers in relation to those two signs, myself.
She has often tried to lobby our local representative to introduce legislation to ban ice from the United States. Our local representative has changed his phone number three times.
“Does the presence of ice somehow offend your sensibilities? Or are you unable to comprehend the sight of one material taking on two forms of matter in the same glass? What would happen if the ice were to somehow sublimate directly into a gas at the same time? Would that alter the shape of the universe as we know it?”
This guy was giving my wife crap and used “sublimate” in a sentence. I loved him.
Enjoys tossin’ rocks at rattlers, does he?
But we got a photo of all of the kids looking like they enjoy each other’s company, so that was a win.
Excellent acting skills on their part.
Coming Up Next: A National Park bigger than the state of Rhode Island that somehow remains one of the best-kept secrets of the National Park system.
A bit like Everglades…
Does it have a similar natural defense system?