revjim.net

I'm stressing out big time. So much to do and so very little time to do it in.

I get to leave work at 3. I'll be home by 3:45. That'll give me almost 2 hours to finish planning my trip. At 5:30 Jess and I are leaving to see a very good friend of mine who I haven't seen in over 3 years. She just happens to be in town and tonight is the last night we'll both be in town. After spending time with her, we'll rush home and go to bed because we have to get up at 2:30 so we can leave at 3:30 to be to the airport by 4:30 so Jess can make a 6:30 flight.

So, at first I was going to bunk up in whatever sleepy town my travels brought me to. Well, that might be possible, but, I randomly looked for hotels in 3 of the towns I was planning on visiting and realized very quickly that poor little towns off the Interstate and major U.S. Routes have no reason to have hotels and motels since they get very little tourism or traffic. While the romantic in me would hope to find kind people that would take me in for a small fee each night, I'm not about to count on that. So I need to break my trip into discernible "days" and try to aim my vehicle toward places that might have hotels toward the end of each of these days.

So far I've got this list of places in mind (in rough order):

* DFW
* Ink Lake State Park, Burnet, TX
* Enchanted Rock State Park, Fredericksburg, TX
* Fredericksburg, TX (XX)
* Pedernales Falls State Park, Johnson City, TX
* Del Rio, TX / Acuna, Mexico
* Marathon, TX
* Big Bend National Park (XX)
* Lajitas, TX
* Presidio, TX / Ojinaga, Mexico
* Marfa, TX
* Davis Mountains State Park, Fort Davis, TX (XX)
* Pecos, TX
* Guadalupe Mountains National Park (XX)
* Monahans Sandhills State Park, Monahans, TX
* Odessa, TX
* Midland, TX
* Abilene, TX
* DFW

If you want to try to break that into 4-8 hour driving chunks over the course of 6 days while trying to arrange sunrise/sunsets near the spots marked with "XX" and then look for cheap hotels nearby, I'd appreciate it. Oh yeah, and feel free to run the trip in reverse order. I don't care either way.