Good Trade / Odessa Trip

A few days ago Frann made mention that she might try to trade her neighbor her jeep for a small pickup he has. I said I'll trade you title for title for the F-150 pickup I bought from my neighbor a while back. She liked the idea so her and Jicky came over late last night to do the trade, but I wanted to be able to follow them home to make sure there wasn't any trouble so she took the jeep back home and I delivered the truck this morning. The pickup is much more suited for what she needs (Hauling dirt, gravel and stuff like that for helping build her earth bag house.) The jeep will work much better for me because I won't have to do a bunch of work on it before I could get it on the highway. I can also use it now. I think the trade came out good for both of us. Of course now more than likely she will be catching rides to Alpine with me instead of me catching rides with her. Jicky will likely be going to when we go.

The last three pictures were as we passed the Monahans Sandhills state park on the way back from Odessa. Growing up as a kid, through high school and for a few years after I got out of the Army my family and later friends and I spent a lot of time at that park. Sand surfing was a lot of fun there, but walking back to the top of the dunes after surfing down them was killer! Lots of fond memories of that park and considering the area around Odessa is basically desert like Terlingua is that was about the only attraction around that area many years ago. No water within about 100 miles and hundreds of miles to large lakes or 600+ miles to a beach so we made do with sand. Of course now that the area has grown up there is a large water park, malls and about anything else a person could think of to do.

In the last picture there is an arrow pointing out dwarf oak trees or in this case Oak bushes. The Sand hills are more or less covered with them and it is the largest oak forest (If you could call it that) in the world as the sand dunes cover a vast area of west Texas. The sand dunes are remnants of the Permian Sea that covered much of west Texas eons ago.

Ripe Tomatoes. :)