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Southeast (Gulf Coast), Texas, United States

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Fort Davis, TX and Davis Mountain State Park

We left the Big Bend National Park on Saturday morning, and arrived at Davis Mountain State Park shortly after noon.  We got set up in our site, and rested for a while.

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On Sunday, we drove up the mountain shown above on the other side of the Bus, and got this picture of our site from above……

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As seen by the signage in the first picture, the park includes the Indian Lodge and a restaurant.  Here are pictures of it……….

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Here are some pictures of the lobby area……..

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Here is a picture from a mountain drive that shows the relative orientation of the lodge to the park…..

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And here are a couple of other pictures from the top of the mountain……..

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On Saturday afternoon, we took a 75 mile scenic route around the area on our way to the McDonald Observatory facility.  The terrain is very similar to Big Bend, except that there is a lot of grassy areas and more plants and trees.  Here are some pictures of the country side in the area…….

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At about 50 miles into the trip, we started to see the telescopes from the McDonald Observatory on the tops of mountain peaks (in the first picture, one on the peak on the left and two on the peak on the right)……..DSC00904DSC00905DSC00906DSC00908DSC00907DSC00911

At the observatory, we signed up for and stayed to attend a 7:30PM “Star Party” that lasted for two hours.  After dark, it began with an informative lecture pointing out the star systems in the sky, like the north star, big & little dippers, etc.  Afterwards, the had 5 big telescopes set up for us to view the stars, such as star clusters, the moon, and Jupiter.  It was a good show, and we got to buy the grandkids some stuff at the gift shop.  There are no pictures because it was dark and only red lighting was being used.  No camera flashes were allowed!!

On Sunday, we drove into the small downtown area of Fort Davis.  Here it is…………

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The last thing that we did during the weekend was a tour of the “Fort Davis National Historic Site…………

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Monday will end our 6 days in the Big Bend area, and we will hit the highway headed for San Antonio. 

1 comment:

Roadrunner Chronicles said...

Very informative. I loved your recap of Ft Davis and McDonald Observatory. It brings back similar memories of our time there. We loved them both but were especially mesmerized by the outdoor evening under the stars with all the constellations being pointed out by the guide. It was spectacular!