It is summer time which way back in the days of yore and youth, used to mean three months of vacation, but now means fitting in a few getaway days escaping from mind-wrenching jobs where you spend hours in a cubicle and have the daily honor of working with Important People. Depending on how many few days one has, the question invariably comes up…where to?
Well, this summer, I’m taking myself, the Cranky Californian and the Teenage Football Hunk out west a ways into the dessert. Now this isn’t just to listen to them complain about how hot it is, because we get plenty of that right here, it’s about visiting one of the “Darndest Coolest Swimming Holes” in the entire state at a little place know as Balmorhea. There, right smack dab in this unlikely terrain is a natural swimming hole with fish and hopefully no additional creatures that might creep me out. An oasis of sorts where we will happily commune with nature. After communing without sunburning, there is a nearby town called Marfa that is kinda famous because it has lights, and not just the kind from the power company, the unexplained phenomena kind.
Some people have said these are “ghost lights” while others have attributed them to aliens. Several groups of Fun Suckers showed up to blast the fun right out of this and said they were just plain, ole car lights that somehow reflect off the highway, then onto something. These people can’t leave anything alone and mysterious.
Outside of possible aliens, Marfa is known as a standout “highly artistic” place because some artist moved there in the 1970s and decided it was a great place to become a minimalist. An example of minimalism would be the metal crape myrtle in the park here, but with much less leaves….or maybe even just a long, metal trunk, now that I think about it….
Film makers have also discovered this quaint west Texas haven and made films like Giant, No Country for Old Men, and maybe the next installment of: “No Place for A Continuous Drought…” or at least that’s what we are hoping for.
I think minimal works here because of the sparseness of the landscape, plus it also looks like they have trailer cafes that you can just walk up to and order food with minimal inconvenience. I’ve been close, but never quite there, and I’m excited to take on the dessert, aliens, minimalists, and just some regular looking fish, no tarantulas or rare lizards. So where are you off to this summer?