Saturday 28th January – Could there be a greater crater?!

We awoke to another chilly morning.  Every day that starts this cold is a competition of who admits defeat first and ventures outside the duvet to turn the heating on…. Most days I lose, but today I was the winner in the ‘pretending to still be asleep’ stakes.  Hooray!

There was no major rush but we wanted to make further ground across Texas towards New Mexico.  It’s still a difficult balance… wanting to make ground but also trying to keep to a budget!  We hit new scenery in Texas today - oil territory.  The scenery was almost as dull as Kansas at times (above), but with some contours to the land, and plenty of eagles to spot as we drove along.  The classic Texan sight in fields, these oil pumps, started appearing and became more numerous as the miles ticked by. 

So why, I ask, could we not find the cheapest gas possible to fill our tank?!  We were expecting it to be back below the $2 per gallon mark but we struggled, driving perilously close to the ‘less than empty’ mark on the gauge.  We weren’t happy enough with $2.15 so only put $30 in…. until that ran out again and we had to put $60 worth in at $2.10 per gallon.  $90 of gas in one day!  We’ve spent our gas budget for the week and it’s only Saturday – yikes!

Having made a very successful impromptu stop yesterday to see the fantastic caverns, today we decided to bypass San Angelo as it would add too much extra mileage, and instead head to the Odessa Meteor Crater, which was on our route towards New Mexico.  This is the second largest meteor crater in the USA – wow!  How impressive?!  Well, as it turns out, not very impressive at all.  This is it:

As this sign explains.... it WAS 100 ft deep but is now only about 6 ft deep.....!

We were underwhelmed to say the least.  But as you can read on the sign it used to be 100 ft deep….. before it was filled in by sand and dirt to within 6’ of the plains.  If the plaques and signs weren’t there you would just drive right past!  A man with a digger could’ve done it.  Okay, so it was created by material from outer space….. But it was nothing to write home about, and yet here I am – writing home about it!  

There was a small museum to explain how they know it is a meteorite crater and when it was discovered etc.. Along with a picture of how it looked in 1953 – much more impressive:

Shouldn’t they dig out all the detritus, dust and sand that has filled up this epic landmark and return it to its former glory?  Apparently not.  Another interesting photo was of the USA’s LARGEST meteorite crater, which also happens to be the WORLD’s largest meteor crater….. in Arizona: 

Now THAT looks like a crater and the location has been circled in our road atlas as a ‘not to miss’ highlight of this trip!

Simon was, of course, overjoyed to be able to make fun of the attraction that I had made us visit as the highlight of our day - I had even made it more of a priority than our weekly Walmart stop! Sadly, that still had to be done but I managed to speed things up a bit in a ‘supermarket sweep’ style whilst Simon got his hair, and ever-bushier beard, cut at the in-store salon. 

From there we’d spotted a State Park on the map which was another 30 miles or so on.  We thought we’d better stop somewhere for a couple of days to conserve what’s left of our weekly fuel, but would there be anything to do?  Well, how about Sand-surfing?!  

Monahans Sandhills State Park consists of 3840 acres of sand dunes, just part of an area that extends all the way into New Mexico!  We arrived just before sunset and the vista was immediately original and beautiful, like no other State Park we have visited to date.  The office was closed though and we were due to put some money in an honesty envelope. Well, thanks partly to a pricey hair do at Walmart and partly to lack of motivation we had let our cash flow reduce to almost nothing.  We scrabbled $15 together in change as a token effort and wrote a note on our envelope to apologise, saying that we would settle the rest of our bill in the morning by credit card!  Then we drove the mile and a half into the park to find our spot for the next couple of days.  As soon as we parked up the colours in the sky over the tops of the dunes were incredible so we legged it to the top of the nearest dune before the darkness stole the view away:

This pink hue in the sky was opposite where the sun had set.  Amazing colours.

We saw a couple of the other campers sledging down the dunes on what look like over-sized Frisbees!  We’ll see how easy it is tomorrow I guess?!

A momentous occasion today that I must mention is passing the 10,000 mile mark of our trip.  I’ve been re-reading ‘America Unchained’ by Dave Gorman, a favourite comedian/adventurer of mine.  I thoroughly recommend the book if you haven’t read it and of course it’s very apt for our travels.  In it he mentions that the thinner part of the States is about 3000 miles across from coast to coast.  That means, if my math(s) is right, that by now we could have driven across the country three times…. And some more!  But we haven’t exactly been going ‘as the crow flies’ have we?!