This year, with Maya starting kindergarten, we have had to adapt to her school calendar. One thing that had shocked me was that they get the entire week off for Thanksgiving. Back in my day, I think we only got Thanksgiving and the day after, but whatever. Not one to let an opportunity pass by, I figured this was a good chance for us to try our kids out on a small road trip to the wilds of west Texas.

Family photo at the end of the Grapevine Hills Trail at Big Bend National Park

It wouldn’t be a Woods vacation without someone vomiting, or at least being terribly sick. Maya had been steadily brewing one of her grade-A snot and horrible coughing viruses, and it seemed to have come to a head the night before we were to leave. Our plan had been to take her to her early morning swim lesson on Saturday and then head out on our adventure.

Alas, after listening to the poor kid coughing all night, we let Maya sleep as late as she could and took our sweet time getting out the door. It didn’t help that I had failed to bake Maya a birthday cake the night before, so I did it Saturday morning while we were packing.

In an effort to finally get our asses out the door, we tested out letting the kids eat fast food in the car while we drove. In the past, this has not worked out, but not this day. It worked out great! Both the kids are now in very upright seats (Maya, a booster and Ian, a car seat) with cup holders. I had given them each a quarter sheet pan to use as a makeshift table top. They ate their food and drank their drinks and played with their shitty plastic fast-food toys and all was good.

Until Maya had a coughing fit, that is. It was epic. I don’t know how long that poor kid was hacking in the back seat, but it end with her yarking up a bunch of phlegm and some portion of her lunch. And she got her seat a bit too, so Sean had to do a quick clean up. If you’ve kept up with this blog, then you know that Sean is now a “cleaning barf from a car seat” expert, given his extensive experience.

Our intention had been to stop over at Enchanted Rock and let the kids go for a hike to help break up the trip. Unfortunately, that park has become wildly popular, and they stopped allowing cars in already at mid-morning. It was probably for the best that we couldn’t take sick girl on a hike, but I at least was disappointed.

The remainder of our drive went pretty smoothly. The kids enjoyed seeing the fluffy white cotton fields, the graceful turbines of the wind farms, and fields of pumpjacks working away, metal mantis-like creatures endlessly dipping their heads for another drink of crude. The sunset was beautiful as we headed into Odessa. Weird flames dotted the horizon here and there from the various refining and processing plants, reminding us yet again we were in oil country. Without our hike, we managed to get into town just in time for dinner. (A dinner which sadly was NOT Waffle House. Reference quote from Tin Cup in the title.)

We usually let the kids share a queen bed, but with Maya’s awful cough, we folded out the couch into a bed and split them up. You can tell that they’re young and everything is fascinating to them, because they were actually fighting over who would get to sleep in the fold-out bed. You wouldn’t hear a grown-up gunning for that particular privilege. The kids love hotels, but this one was especially awesome because once the couch bed was folded out, they were left with a pile of couch cushions that they figured out how to arrange into a makeshift building against one of the beds. They took turns building and hiding in their couch cushion forts until finally we all had to get to bed.

Maya sledding down a sand dune

The next day, Maya’s actual birthday, we loaded up the car and drove the maybe 35 minutes or so to Monahans Sandhills State Park. After paying our park admission and renting our disc sleds, the park ranger handed us a nub of wax and we drove out to the dunes. We started out on a small hill, mostly because the kids’ excitement couldn’t be contained and it was close. We waxed the bottom of Maya’s sled and down the little hill she went. She LOVED it. After seeing that Maya had survived, Ian gave it a shot too. More smiles and laughs!

Ian sledding down the sand dune

They only slid down the hill a couple times before they were both clamoring for a big hill. I couldn’t tell you how often we trudged up that soft-sanded dune, but we rode down again and again in various individual and stacked permutations. Ian seemed to prefer riding down on an adult’s lap, while Maya was more content to go it alone. She even accidentally rolled head over heels at least once and popped up laughing. We spent an easy hour and a half sledding away. Then at the end, we all sat at a picnic table and enjoyed Maya’s on-the-road chocolate cookie shaped cake.

Our next stop for vacation was Terlingua so that Maya could have her dinner at the Starlight Theatre and we’d be in a good place to explore Big Bend National Park the next day. After an unremarkable lunch in the city of Monahans, we headed out for the roughly three hour drive. This part of Texas is not densely populated so services are few and far between. Both kids will now at least tolerate a pit stop behind a bush along a 75 mile-per-hour highway.

There was still a bit of daylight left when we rolled into Terlingua. We checked into our hotel and drove to the restaurant fairly early, but it was no use; there was a 90 minute wait. We tried to talk Maya out of it, but apparently we had done such a good job of getting her excited about the place that she wouldn’t hear of changing venues. I’m sure the musicians on the porch and friendly dogs running around didn’t hurt.

The kids thought these stools were a crack-up

It was her birthday, so we decided to wait it out if that’s what she really wanted to do. We killed some time wandering around and checked out a few of the old ghost town ruins for a bit. Unfortunately, that didn’t take as long as we had hoped. As a parent, you sometimes get this hazy, sweet image in your head of you child happily enjoying her special birthday dinner and topping it off with a two-scoop special birthday sundae with pecans on top, everybody feeling celebratory and content.

That’s not what happened here. I don’t believe in omens, but if I did, I’d have clued in when the sweet doggie we had been petting earlier ran up to us coated in what can only be described as liquefied cow shit. Nobody pooped their pants – the omen wasn’t quite that literal – but dinner did not go smoothly. Worse still, the birthday girl seemed to have a miserable time. I guess between the long drive and the long wait, it was just too much, even for a newly turned six-year-old.

To top it off, poor Maya had a rough night full of coughing fits and gasping breaths. For her, this was the worst night of the trip. None of us got much sleep and so we didn’t get going nearly as early as we had intended. After a trying breakfast with two antsy kids, we headed into Big Bend National Park.

Maya’s photos from the Window View area

The thing about this park is that it’s huge. Sean and I have been a couple times before, and we are all too aware that it cannot be adequately experienced in a single day. However, we figured the kids wouldn’t be into it for multiple days so we narrowed our plan to a few specific sites. With our late start and the way the ol’ Prius was vibrating over the washboarded dirt road that was the “short” route to Santa Elena canyon, we decided to cut out that part of our visit. This was a real downer because it’s our favorite part of the park. The kids were fixated on the mountains though, so that’s what we homed in on. We took them up to the Chisos Mountain Lodge area where they got their feet wet with the very short Window View Trail. It’s a 0.4 mile loop that’s paved. I’m not even sure you can honestly call it a hike. The kids loved it though. Maya had fun taking photos, and I think Ian had fun being her subject. And we saw two of the fabled black bears at the edge of the parking lot!

At this point, Maya and Ian desperately wanted to climb up the mountains, so we kind of lucked into letting them. After a snack lunch at a picnic table near the lodge, we tried the Grapevine Hills trail. It’s an out and back trail, about a mile in each direction. The first 3/4 of a mile is more or less flat with the last 1/4 mile being pretty steep. They did it! Well, Maya did it. Ian enjoyed a piggyback ride for maybe a quarter of a mile or so on the flat part on the way there, and later on Sean picked him up for a few minutes on the way back out. But little dude climbed all the hard parts (I suspect that was his favorite part). The hike was beautiful. Red-orange boulders with aquamarine cactus paddles lined our path and of course, there’s the neat balanced rock at the end. Both the kids wanted us to get out from under it for fear it would fall.

All the loveys came along for the Grapevine Hills hike.

After all that hiking and climbing, the kids were shot, so we decided to drive out so we could show them the back side of the window view they had seen earlier that day. On our way there, we saw people randomly stopped in the road. Pausing to investigate, we discovered they had found a tarantula! Some of our friends find them in their houses. We have never seen one outside of captivity. It was HUGE. I wish I had thought to put down something next to it for scale. It was easily larger than my hand. Unfortunately, we were holding up traffic and couldn’t stay long enough to really compose the photo.

We did see the back of our window view, and then we headed out for the long drive to Marfa, seeing a strange and beautiful sunset as we drove. We were all too tired by the time we got to our AirBNB to do too much beyond getting settled in, so we didn’t go seek out the legendary Marfa lights. The AirBNB was an artist’s property, and care had been taken in decorating it. I wish I had thought to snap a few photos of the place. There were paintings and interesting furnishings. Little accents paid homage to the west Texas vibe – cow horns, tumble weeds, cowboy hats. The kids loved it, of course. They each had little twin beds in a room together and were excited to sleep there.

We took it really easy the next morning. The place was comfortable and there was room to let the kids play a bit. The only sour note was that apparently the propane tank was empty, so I had a very cold shower. The owner of the place tried hard to make it right. She got the tank filled in pretty short order and told us to stay later if we wanted. We did take advantage of the later departure time, leisurely packing the car and letting the kids romp around and play hide and seek for a while. They even got to visit the goat and horse that lived in the lot behind the house.

Maya and Ian, relaxing on the porch of our Marfa AirBNB

It turns out that Tuesday is NOT the day to be in Marfa. Most everything is closed. I had loose ideas of experiencing some of the arty culture in the area, but instead we had a late lunch and drove out to the Marfa Prada installation. It is singularly weird seeing a Prada store sitting out there alone in the wide open plain with the desert scrub around it, 75 mile an hour traffic tearing past, the occasional tumble weed rolling through. There’s a kind of open mesh fencing around the place, onto which people have attached all manner of items: locks, toys, photos, even a pair of children’s shoes. Maya the photographer had a ton of fun snapping photos of some of the items and of her brother posing in front of the Prada. Ian had fun NOT sitting in the car for a change.

After that, we drove on into Fort Davis, taking the scenic route through the Davis Mountains. Once in Fort Davis, we checked into our hotel and had just a few minutes to settle in before heading out for an early dinner before our big event of the day. This was one of the better meals of our trip. The Fort Davis Drug Store and Hotel, among many other things, sports an old fashioned soda fountain where we had chocolate malts and cherry cokes and delicious burgers. Ian the burger hater, had delicious chicken strips instead.

Hobby-Eberly Telescope

After dinner, we drove to the McDonald Observatory to attend one of their star parties. We weren’t sure how our just-turned-six and not-quite-four year old kids would manage. We arrived maybe twenty minutes before show time and really didn’t doodle around too long before we all paraded out to the amphitheater for a lecture. The night was clear and cold and the lecture was concise. They chatted about the things we would see later through the telescopes – binary stars, a nebula, and a distant star cluster … the moon. They talked about how the International Space Station would be passing by on its orbit in a few minutes. They used a big laser-pointer to give us a constellation tour. Ian fidgeted, pronounced the talk boring, and played with rocks. Maya danced around alternately chanting “telescope” and “constellation.”

At the right moment, our lecturer’s phone cued him that it was ISS time. There were several hundred of us out in that amphitheater and all of us were watching for a few brief minutes as it moved through the sky. It looked like a fast-moving star, reflected sunlight making it appear bright white in the sky. Then it fell back into Earth’s shadow and to our eyes disappeared. Maya took a while to find it, but once she did, her excitement was obvious. Even Ian managed to see it.

We went all around looking through various telescopes. You could always tell when Maya finally spotted whatever she was meant to be seeing because she’d shriek, “I see it!!!” It was tougher to tell if Ian saw what he was meant to see. One of the telescopes was trained on the moon though, and he definitely got a good look at that. Ian has a nightlight that can be changed to show a number of different scenes, and ever since our visit to the observatory, it’s been dialed in to look like the moon. Partway through, we went inside to visit the gift shop and warm up a bit. After going back out and looking through a few more telescopes, we loaded up in the car for the dark drive back to our hotel.

McDonald Observatory

We were originally planning to get up, have breakfast, and drive home, but we had had such a great experience at the observatory, that we decided to drive back up there in the daylight to wander around and take some photos. It was a beautiful day. The kids had fun tromping around outside and looking at the various BIIIG telescopes. We were even able to go inside and look around at the huge Hobby-Eberly telescope, which I believe we were told is the fifth largest telescope in the world.

While the view from way up high was amazing, we eventually had to give up and drive home. Sean was a man on a mission. I offered to drive more than once, but we all know he makes better time than I do. As I recall, the drive was completely uneventful. We said goodbye to the mountains, goodbye to the desert, and goodbye to the big wind turbines as we barreled along the highway.

Maya’s activity for today: painting the solar system string of lights she picked up from the McDonald Observatory gift shop

Was this trip a good idea? I’m still debating that. Maya and Ian really enjoyed all the things we did, but there was a lot of driving time. And because they had so much sitting and waiting time in the car, if there was sitting and waiting time for anything else, it was torture. They were hell on wheels in a restaurant. Ultimately, I think we all appreciate the experiences we collected, but would shoot for a better experience to drive time ratio in the future.