Home and Away

September 2012 - Lincoln National Forest

Every once in a while, we get an itching for fresh air and the mountains. So, this particular weekend, we headed to a little town we know called Queen in the Lincoln National Forest for the weekend.

I might be elevating Queen to an inappropriate status by calling it a little town; it's really a house, a trailer, a gas tank, and a restaurant that only opens on Sunday afternoons and serves whatever Bob shot in the woods that week, with beans.

On the way, we decided to stop at Sitting Bulls Falls. This place is a neat little find; beautiful waterfall, trickling streams and luscious vegetation in the middle of the desert.

We lucked out this weekend and found the perfect camping spot. Driving up the 4x4 roads, we came upon a secluded spot with amazing views overlooking a vast expanse of desert.

Spot the Mary

We set up the nightcam and caught this critter scampering around

Lubbock Labor Day Weekend

Labor day weekend, Mary and I decided to check out Lubbock, a university (Texas Tech) town three hours north of Midland. Incidentally, I got my masters from Texas Tech.

First, we headed to the Science Spectrum, a very hands-on museum. By hands-on, I mean that every exhibit is either a puzzle requiring tenth grade reasoning skills, or a really cool visual activity that requires a full fifteen minutes of observation. Mary paid attention to every little thing, so it took us a few hours to make our way through.

Super-cool is their OMNI theater. Unfortunately, it was another 2 hour wait for the next showing of Ocean World so we opted for Rescue, an interesting mini documentary about rescue response to

natural disasters.

Mary's next priority (or first, if you paid attention to the whining on the way into the science museum), was to visit Joyland. Who knew Lubbock had a theme park?

Sunday, we took a trip out to Buffalo Springs Lake. I was pleasantly surprised and made a mental note to visit this place again with the popup and a couple of kayaks. There were many campers on this holiday weekend and the lake was busy with boats, jet skis, and swimmers.

Before heading home, we checked out the local orchard (by local, I mean the only orchard I could find on a web search within 4 hours of Midland, where water restrictions are still in full force, and the reservoirs still stand at 16% of capacity).

We spent some time picking various kinds of apples.

When we got home I realized three things:

a. picking apples at an orchard sounds very quaint and charming, but it was actually very hot and smelled like rotten fruit
b. nobody in our house actually likes eating apples
c. between us, we had returned with around 5 pounds of bruised apples

So, we baked an apple pie.

August 2012 - Houseboat on Lake Amistad

Summer was coming to a close so we immediately jumped on it when friends of ours had the wonderful idea to rent a houseboat on Lake Amistad for the weekend.

Lake Amistad is bounded by Val Verde County on the Texas side and the state of Coahuila on the Mexican side of the border. It is a huge lake at just over 100 sq. miles and is managed by the U.S. and Mexico.

Our houseboat was a little larger than anticipated (we could have held a wedding reception on the second floor) and we got ourselves into some tight spots trying to navigate the canyons.

Despite driving for several hours total, we covered less than half the lake. I have visited Lake Amistad before, but I didn't realize how massive it was until we spent three days actually on the water.

We had toyed with the idea of renting a couple of jet skis to take along with us, but nobody felt comfortable driving the thing, let alone towing two other vehicles behind.