The Road to Sedona

Mary and I made two one-night stops on our way to Sedona.

The first was at a destination restaurant outside El Paso called Cattleman’s Steakhouse at Indian Cliffs Ranch. We were able to stay overnight in the parking lot. This place is 20+ minutes southeast of El Paso and includes a zoo area where diners wander around while you are waiting for your table. We saw goats, buffalo, longhorn cattle (of course), llamas, donkeys, rattlesnakes, rabbits, peacocks, fallow deer and mouflon sheep.

I first saw this place on the travel channel and thought we would give it a try since it was a nice day’s drive from Austin. The steaks were excellent but the menu was a little odd. There were no salads of any kind available. All meals came with choice of potato, rice or corn then beans, rolls and coleslaw. No other vegetables, no green salad. I guess that’s the way they do it in west Texas.

Our next stop was at Kartchner Caverns State Park in Arizona. We stayed here last year and toured the living cavern. This time we were just making an overnight stop and it happened to be the night they were having an astronomy Star Party. Several amateur astronomers from across the state were there with telescopes to show visitors what could be seen in a clear dark sky away from the light pollution of large cities.

We had a very good time seeing the rings and moons of Saturn, the core stars and clouds of gas in the Orion Nebula, and the disk shaped star clusters of galaxies M51 and M82. We also looked at Sirius and the Pleiades star cluster. It was glorious!

In the afternoon, we also saw the Sun through a specially filtered telescope and you could see several dark areas of sun spots.

We usually try to avoid one-night stopovers because you really don’t get a chance to do anything, but these two stops kept us from having a 12+ hour drive, and we actually got do something worthwhile and have a little fun.