No lights (Marfa Mystery Lights, that is) and then DUST and WIND

We don't think we saw any Marfa Mystery lights last night.

Sunset at the Marfa Mystery Lights viewing rest area

If you look very carefully to the left of the power pole right at the horizon, you might see a light. We are pretty sure the lights we saw (including that one) were from the headlights of cars on highway 67. We did see a "glow" near the ground in a direction that would not have been from US 67... but it was very dim.

The sunrise this morning was pretty! The picture doesn't really capture it...

While I was up getting a picture of the sunrise, I saw a critter outside Miss Doozie...

A cute little bunny!

We had seen in weather reports that there was a wind advisory for west of us today. We decided to start west and if it got too bad, consider stopping to stay in Balmorhea State Park. But... we also saw that the wind was going to bring in cold weather (some places in Texas had a high in the 70s today and are predicting a low of 17 (!!!) overnight). We don't mind dealing with a night of cold weather, but hunkering down for a few days of it... nah!

We saw an odd looking thing out in the field on our way toward Fort Stockton on US 90.

Turns out it was a Tethered Aerostat Radar System (TARS) - we had seen one near Yuma back in March, 2015 (http://trekincartwrights.blogspot.com/2015/03/part-2-long-day-plank-road-mexican.html)

Note that the view is pretty clear - no wind at this point...

By the time we got to Fort Stockton, we stopped at a rest area to make breakfast, and the wind was blowing pretty hard. Miss Doozie does pretty good in wind - she is heavy and her weight tends to be carried lower than most motorhomes. But even so, I wasn't feeling good about driving Miss Doozie, so Dwayne took over at Sierra Blanco. 

You can see that it is really dusty (that isn't fog). At one point when I was driving, it got down to just a few car lengths of visibility for about 1/4 mile. Thankfully, it didn't last long (the "white-out").

This was on the west side of El Paso, heading toward Las Cruces, NM.

You can see dust blowing across the road.

We made some additional stops - a green tumbleweed hit Miss Doozie with a resounding "BANG!" so we stopped to make sure that there was no damage and that we weren't dragging it along, we filled up with diesel at a Murphy USA in El Paso ($340+ later we had extra weight to give more stability), and we stopped at a truck stop soon after the last picture I posted above when the wind just was beyond what we were willing to deal with. We stayed there a couple of hours (the weather forecast said that the wind should start to die down about 4pm). By then, though, the sun was on a difficult angle for driving west, so we decided to stop at a Walmart in Las Cruces.

We are still hoping that we'll just be tonight in sub-freezing temperatures, and the forecast here says it will only go down to 28, so we should be ok (our storage bays are heated so our tanks and water systems should be fine). We are definitely looking for warmer weather!!!