Monahans Sandhills, TX

The park and town of Monahans is the center of Permian Basin, Oil Country Texas.  We’ve seen so many refineries, rail stops, machine shops and lots of oil rigs.  The area is flat so you can see for miles around.  Ironically, around Midlands, there are large solar farms and east of that, lots of wind farms.

The park is close to 3500 acres of sand dunes,  with campground and picnic areas so you can explore the dunes and go sandboarding. For me, it’s like camping in Tantooine for the Star Wars fans.  I love the dunes with their wavy sand patterns and the constant wind across them.  So different from anything else we know.

There’s a bit of wildlife here, mostly birds.  I saw a pair of scaled quails, they look like little chickens, so cute. They walk around our picnic table, then run up the hill to their nest.

We are here only for one full day, so of course, I had to try sand boarding.  The visitor’s center rents out “disks” you can use to slide down the hills.  It’s not as easy as you would think, you need a nice steep slope to get any speed.  I’ve tried it, Tom was supervising and providing directions, like “lean back more”. I’ve glad I did it, going down is fun, but the return is not so easy.

We met couple of campers, it’s nice chatting and seeing why people are traveling.  For some, it’s a quick stop, one couple of Austin, TX is working on camping in all 100 Texas State Parks!  They happened to have a Brinkley as well.  We also met a young Swedish couple, who converted a school bus and are now planning to travel and work remotely on the road.

I’m hoping to catch the night sky tonight, there’s very little light pollution and the sky is clear right now.  Then in the morning we are off to Roswell, New Mexico.