Back to El Paso, January 31, 2020

Our drive today was to take us from Terlingua back to El Paso, where we will fly home tomorrow. As usual, rather than taking the direct route via I10, we chose to take the sccenic route via Texas route 170, through Terlingua to Lajitas to Marfa to Presidio. This road has lots of curves and steep grades, including the steepest in Texas at a 15% grade. The scenery is fantastic and the drive resembles a ride on a roller coaster. It passes through Big Bend State Park, along mountains that border the Rio

Grande. But the scenery wasn't the only interesting feature of the road. Near Valentine, we passed an art installation: a a freestanding building—specifically a Prada storefront in the middle of  literally nowhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prada_Marfa West of Marfa, we passed what looked like a tethered blimp. It turned out to be a Tethered Aerostat Radar System (TARS). Per Wikipedia, "the aerostats are large fabric envelopes filled with helium, and can rise up to an altitude of 15,000 feet while tethered by a single cable. The largest lifts a 1 ton payload to an operating altitude providing low-level, downward-looking radar coverage. The primary mission is to provide low-level radar surveillance along the southwest

border of the United States and Mexico, the Straits of Florida and the Caribbean in support of federal agencies involved in the nation's drug interdiction program. This one is in Marfa, TX." 

Further on, we drove alongside a train carrying hundreds of military vehicles, from tanks, to jeeps to cargo containers. 

We loved the drive, the scenery, and the sights! Late in the afternoon, we arrived at our stay for the night at Homewood Suites near the airport. Their shuttle picked us up after we dropped off our car rental, dropped us and picked us up at a nearby restaurant, and took us to the airport the next morning.