Marfa, Texas, a short drive away from Ft. Davis, owes its name to the wife of a train engineer who was infatuated with The Brothers Karamazov novel by Dostoyevsky and its historical buildings to money invested for an oil boom that never happened. This town of 1600 people is now considered an art meca, a place for tourists to see art studios and eat good food. The tourist information center is in a preserved USO building with a gorgeous chandelier in the gymnasium, and The Hotel Paisano and Presidio County Courthouse are on the National Register of Historic Places. The hotel maintains a strip of green grass and trees on the east side that look very un-desert-like. Marfa also has some mysterious lights that appear about a dozen times a year with various possible explanations. The mystery just adds to the culture of the town.

And I found a picture of the “mountain goats” I saw near Alpine on our way to Ft. Davis from Terlingua. The Aoudad sheep are an introduced species, escaped from ranches, that compete with the native bighorn sheep. They are a very pretty tan color, and their heads looked goat-shaped to me. And, of course, I have to sneak in a picture of my cute cats:)

Another mystery about Marfa—why did it smell of burnt sugar all over town?