Precious D's Pearls for Swine

For Labor Day weekend my parents and I planned to visit my father's home town of Fort Davis, Texas. We were also planned to hit the Marfa Lights Festival in nearby Marfa and The Big Bend Balloon Bash (hot air balloons) in the similarly nearby Alpine.

Just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

First the motel screwed up our reservations. Apparently the area is a popular getaway for Labor Day and the Marfa thing is a big deal to some, so places fill up. My mother is in a wheel chair until we can get her knee replacement surgery. So, she needs a handicap accessible room and most hotels/motels only have a few. Mom had reserved such a room weeks ago at the Fort Davis Motor Inn and RV Campground for Saturday and Sunday nights. When we get there these idiots tell us that the reservation was for Friday night and since we weren't there they gave the room to someone else. They weren't very apologetic and totally unhelpful, making no effort to find us another room somewhere else. So, SCREW YOU FORT DAVIS MOTOR INN AND RV CAMPGROUND!

Several months ago we had read an article in the Odessa American about a new restaurant/bar in Fort Davis called the Sherlock Holmes Outpost. So we decided to have lunch there and go back home.

Mom couldn't resist telling the waitress, Hannah, how crappy the Motor Inn had been. Hannah told us that the same people who own the Outpost also owned a new hotel in town, The Harvard Hotel, and she'd call them and see if they had anything. They did and Hannah set the whole thing up. The room was about twice what we were going to spend at the Motor Inn, but we figured, better to have one night in a nice place than two nights in a crappy place, or no nights at all, so we took it.

The Harvard Hotel was very nice, but the bed was too high for mom to get into so she ended up sleeping in the roll-away bed while Dad and I took the double. Both of them snored so much that it was hard for me to get to sleep.



In the morning we were supposed to head over to the Balloon Bash in time for the 8am launch. The 'rents were slow getting started and since we were only staying the one night now, we had to pack everything up. So, by the time we got there the balloons had already launched. The only balloon left was a tethered one that was giving rides. Since we still had to get to the festival, I decided it wasn't worth waiting in the long line for an obviously very short balloon ride.


The Marfa Lights Festival turned out to be lame and we got rained on. I'm told that the festival has been better in the past. For those of you who don't know, the Marfa Lights are fairly famous "ghost lights" that have been witnessed for at least 100 years. There are lost of theories, both scientific and crackpot, but supposedly no one knows what causes them. Since we couldn't stay the extra night, I didn't get the chance to see them. Thus I can not yet give my opinion on the cause. I suspect that it was once a natural phenomena that is now augmented by the city council.

Add to all that my father's crap driving and my mother's crabieness and it was a real shit vacation.

I got some cool pictures though. I'll post more later.