Wed 8 Mar 2023
Woke up at home and am going to bed in Monahans Sandhills State Park. This is a great place! Full of birds, mysterious holes in the sand, and sand--lots and lots of sand. Tall bare dunes you can climb all over, and little scrubby dunes that you can walk all over. Except for the sand burs--Molly got into lots of them, poor thing. If we were staying here longer, I'd put her booties on her.
But first, how did we get here? We drove. We left home just before nine o'clock and had a pretty good drive except for a whole lot of slow-ish traffic around Midland/Odessa. I kind of dozed off then and didn't really notice it.
So we made the six-hour google maps drive with one 11-minute gas stop and one 20-minute gas/dog walk stop, and arrived in six hours and 10 minutes. Pretty impressive. It is true that Ed was hitting 85 to 90 miles per hour a good bit of the time, especially when the wind shifted and was pushing us. I see no reason for the extra speed, but it didn't seem all that dangerous. Traffic wasn't heavy except in the cities.
This place is very close to the interstate (I-20) and so you can hear the traffic noise, but it is still a wonderful and wild place. It's chilly today and the park is not very crowded. It just so happens that the campsite I chose is sort of a "double" pull-through. Typically they'll have a camping loop and the pull-throughs will be sort of a semi-oval off to each side, one per campsite. But this particular one (site #1) is on the same oval as the campsite in front of us. There's a trailer from Kansas parked there, and their hind end is so close to our front end that pulling out again in the morning is going to be problematic--if they're still here. I can't imagine too many people spending too much time here, so there's a decent chance they will be gone before us.
I have not seen a sign of the people in that trailer. Mind you, it's pretty chilly and windy outside and I imagine most people are staying huddled in their homesites. We will see.
Molly and I took walks to each of the two day use areas. Between digging sand burs out of Molly's paws and taking on and taking off my gloves (to take pictures), I mostly looked at birds. Two groups of sparrows that were probably white-crowned sparrows. I'd hoped for something unusual but probably not. One bird in the dunes that was almost certainly a western Scrub Jay. A Northern Harrier hunting--could have been a Harris' Hawk but the shape and my one good look at the head said Harrier. Tons of doves. And a pair of very large quail scurried away when they saw us--darn. We went in pursuit but couldn't catch up to them.
It's been a good day, and I'm gradually shaking off the funk and fury of my last few days at home. This is the way retirement is supposed to be! Not hiding in the office with a floor fan on high and pointed toward the wall (to make noise), and trying to do boring contract work that I have no interest in doing and no hope of ever finishing, And not heading outside to kill time because the inside of the house is full of yelling and crying. And not trying to do my kitchen work in the between hours when May doesn't need to be there. and not retreating into the bedroom as soon after 7:30 as possible, to play on the computer and read and try my best not to go back into the rest of the house for anything except to get a snack and let the dogs in and out.
This is what my life is supposed to be.
Tomorrow, El Paso!
Review Monahans Sandhills State Park $15
Like a sweet sandy beach in the middle of Texas.
This is a lovely little place. Not a large number of camping spots--I expect most people spend a single night here since it is so close to the Interstate. But I could enjoy being here for several days--not just sliding on the sand or climbing over the dunes, but walking the roads to looks for wildlife and birds, sitting on top a dune and staring into space, and enjoying the otherworldliness of it all. You can hear road noise in the distance, but the overall feeling is quiet, calm and serene.
That might not be true in summer, when families with kids are rolling down the hills. But that could be fun, too.
We had no trouble with the electric (50-amp) or water hookups. The dump station was easy to access. The only slight issue we had was that our chosen site, Willow Draw #1, shared its pull-through "loop" with the site in front of it. Each had their own picnic table, but the length of the driveway was split between us and the trailer in front of us. We did not have to unhook our toad, but it was very tricky to pull out of the space without hitting the hookups on the left or the trailer in front.
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