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Wanderung 11

A Tantalizing Taste of the Texas Tropical Trail

January-February 2006

Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 - Driving across Texas to Monahans Sandhills State Park.

Calculating from the maps that we had a long day's drive ahead of us (about 420 miles), we attempted to make an early start by getting up at dawn and having an early breakfast. Did you ever notice how things always go wrong particularly when you are in a hurry? Well, the same thing happened to us. We were delayed by finding a tire with low tire pressure and pumping it up, deciding the wastewater tanks were sufficiently full to warrant a stop at the dump station, and suchlike minor but time-consuming tasks. The net result was that we didn't actually start driving west until 8:45 a.m., which was exactly the same time we had departed on our previous overnight stays! Ah well.

The interstates around Dallas and Fort Worth were crowded with truck and car traffic, as one might expect, but the traffic thinned out a bit as we proceeded west to Abilene and then through the "oil patch" area around Midland and Odessa. We finally fetched up for the night at Monahans Sandhills State Park, which advertised itself on a billboard as "The Sahara of the Southwest". What kind of advertisement was that? Would a typical person really want to camp in the middle of the Sahara Desert, or even a smaller Texas-sized version of it? Fortunately we are blessed (cursed?) with sufficient curiosity that we persevered and drove into the park.

Although the landscape beside the interstate just looked like some small sandy hills covered with scrub brush and stunted trees, inside the park the landscape suddenly changed into true sand dunes just like a miniature Sahara Desert. In fact, we were lucky enough to have a few minutes of daylight left after we set up our trailer in campsite #1, where we disturbed a covey of quails. After setting up we wandered among the dunes trying to capture the odd and eerie nature of the landscape.

Although this is a dry area of Texas, it still gets more water than the real Sahara Desert, of course, so many of the dunes are covered with drought resistant vegetation like dune grass, some kind of brush, and a curious type of miniature oak tree called a "Shin Oak" (Quercus Havardi). Other dunes, however, are quite bare and obviously are being drifted by the wind. We saw the sand encroaching on the access road and the camping spots in the campground, and in fact we were strongly cautioned to not drive off the road or we would probably get stuck.

What I liked the best was the natural, wind-sculpted shape of the bare dunes. They had sinuous curves in them that were somehow very attractive, and the tops were covered with these small wind blown ripples of sand, just like little choppy waves on an ocean swell. Although walking in the sand made footprints that marred the marvelous fractal symmetry of nature, I was sure our footprints were temporary and would be erased by the next big wind storm if not before. Of course, wandering across the dunes loaded our boots up with sand, and Monika insisted that we sit down outside the trailer and empty them out so that we would not track it all inside.

After sundown we retreated into the trailer for a cozy dinner and just listened to the silence for a change. After so many noisy, crowded campgrounds, the silence and solitude of our campsite was both restful and somehow comforting. We worked on the computers a while and then started in on Anne Perry's "Defend and Betray", which was the next book in her Inspector Monk series.

Copyright 2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

January 06
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31
February 2006
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28

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