Marathon, Texas

I drove into town at 1:30pm. I am exhausted and hungry and in desperate need of a pick-me-up. Yet I will go on to Alpine 30 miles away, a decent-sized city where I can stock up on food for my three-day trek into the Big Bend Wilderness.

It's86F as I write this in the early afternoon. A cold front is supposed to hit the region tomorrow with lows in the 30s or 40s. I have plenty of cold-weather clothes left still waiting to be worn. I never did do laundry at the Laughlin AFB as planned.

Marathon is the host city to Big Bend National Park where gasoline today is selling for $3.36. The park is 70 miles due south of here. I've been doing a lot (too much at times) of in-and-around driving, and the park is big enough I could easily use up a tank of gasoline in three days.

Marathon has all its good restaurants on the main street, Highway 90. There's the upscale Gage Hotel and restaurant, modeled to look like an adobe mansion. There's also the plain Motel on the west side of town, the Cottonwood Cafe and the French Grocer a block north of the Cafe. The rest of town is a collection of small tin shacks or crumbling adobe.

I can see the brown tops of the park, but I can hold in my excitement because tomorrow morning I will be here by 10am to hike the first of at least three hikes. It will be mid-week and the only people I should encounter are all the RVs I passed driving north. There's a convoy of three Canadians from Quebec somewhere east of me on Highway 90.

The Holland Hotel is my goal today, plus a lot of walking in Alpine, TX. Kevin and I were here before, but missed the Hotel entirely. Instead we ate at a pizzaria and headed on to Fort Davis State Park north of here. We bypassed Big Bend entirely because we had three cats with us.