Marfa Lights

If you’ve never heard of them, the Marfa Lights are mysterious lights that appear on the horizon at night in a particular stretch of road in a particular direction. The lights move around, change color, appear and disappear and even split up. We decided to spend the night at the Marfa Mystery Lights Viewing Center to see if we could see these lights. Yes, the town built a special viewing center with red lights to keep your eyes accustomed to the dark and 3 sets of binoculars if you want to see the lights closer.

 What we saw was a red light on a tower to the right side of the view. There were lights that appeared in that general area that moved around and appeared and disappeared. It didn’t look particular “mysterious” since they didn’t change colors and they were so distinct. I’d trust the scientific explanation of car lights from a highway in that area before I’d go with the spirits or ghost theories. But then, others have seen lights in other areas from the viewing area where there aren’t any highways. We talked to quite a few people that have seen the lights. Plus, the story is that the lights were seen back in 1883 when car lights would be sorely lacking. So, who knows? Even though it was cold, there was a fairly steady stream of cars with people coming to see the lights. At one point a bus drove in full of people to see the lights!

In the meantime, the stars were absolutely amazing. The Milky Way was bright. It was probably the clearest stars I’ve seen in 40 years or so.

Did I say it was cold, it was very cold! It dropped in temperature when we were in Davis Mountains. The temperature dropped to 20 F at night for a few nights in a row. When John tried to dump the tanks the final morning, he found the lines froze. The sewer pipe we have to connect lines was frozen and cracked. Turns out the artic pack we have (heaters for the tanks) aren’t working. We ended up buying a new pipe and things finally thawed in a few days. Ah, the sh_t you have to take when living in an RV (yes, literally, the sh_t froze)!