Getting there.

The trip to Terlingua started at the crack of dawn, or what I like to call the "butt crack of dawn", at about 5:30AM last Thursday morning. To make things easy on the guy who was pickin' us up, Denise spent the night at my place. She went home after work and packed the stuff she was taking, and then I went over there after the regular Wednesday night pool playing and picked her and her stuff up. I'd waited till the night before departure to get ready, so I was up till about 2:30 getting it all in the bags and out in the garage. When the alarm went off at about 5:15, I was draggin', but the excitement of the trip woke me up and I was rarin' to go. Mark told us he'd be here between 6 and 6:30, but he got to my place at about 6:45. I was wishin' I'd slept in a bit more, but I was happy to be on the road.



Mark drove us to our first stop, in Llano, where we ate breakfast at a combination stop-and-rob and McDonalds. Denise rode comfortably in the back seat and I rode shotgun and navigated.



One thing about camping with ex army cooks, they know how to pack a truck. You ever see a neater job of crammin' a ton of shit in a small space? I was amazed.



The scenery along the way is beautiful, as I've said. Click on these shots and you will see more of those windmills in the shot above, and some nice details in those below.



We stopped for gas in Bakersfield, just this side of Ft. Stockton. There were some sweet little stray dumpster divers wanderin' around there...



But that didn't lesson the pain as the gas station folks basically pushed us over the hood of the truck and raped the shit out of us for the gas we needed. Check out the price of regular. No lube and no reach around. Oh well, they know they have a sellers market out there in the boonies. Note to self... Next time gas up in Sheffield.



More purdy stuff. I took over drivin' after breakfast in Llano and drove the rest of the way to Terlingua. I like to drive these long trips, and Mark would aways prefer to navigate and/or sleep.



We really enjoyed his satellite radio along the way, mostly listening to channel 16 (?), The Vault.



I'd also burned a few CDs for the trip. Mark and I share a taste in good, loud rock music, so I chose appropriate fare. Denise likes most of it too, though her taste usually moves more towards R & B.

The first CD started with Tool (their cover of "No Quarter" and then "46 and 2"), and then some Government Mule (their covers of tunes like "Almost Cut My Hair" and "No Quarter"). The rest were a mix of the Black Crowes, the Allman Brothers, and Jimi Hindrix. We'd switch back and forth between the CDs and the radio. The Vault is an amazing channel. We heard stuff on there, by folks like Rare Earth, Traffic, the Beatles, and Jethro Tull, that nether of us had heard in ages.



The scenery began to get more beautiful and mountainous as we turned south in Ft. Stockton and headed through Alpine, towards Big Bend and Terlingua.



When we got to the site of the cook-off, we found the camp already laid out and folks already drinkin' and cookin'. These are mostly the same folks we see every year, and also at the cook-off in Sweetwater. We unloaded the truck and set up our camp in the same place as usual. My job was to set up our tents (Mark uses one of mine) and get everything in order. There was a bit more pressure this time from the fact that this was Denise's first camping trip in a tent. I usually try to be comfortable when I'm car camping, but this time I was packing for two, and I wanted her to be comfortable and have a good time.

The next post will illustrate what I'm talkin' about. It was plush. I know my shit. You'll see. Later. Cheers.