Road trip through WEST TEXAS (Alpine, Fort Davis, & El Paso) | Our journey to Alaska BEGINS!

The journey to Alaska begins right now. Right now. In case you missed our last video, we're spending the next five months or so driving from Austin, Texas up to Alaska and we left Austin early this morning but we're not leaving Texas quite yet. It takes what feels like forever to get out of Texas so we thought we'd have a little bit of fun along the way. We have a jam-packed three-day road trip ahead of us and today we are driving six hours to Alpine, Texas. We're about halfway to Alpine and we are stopping for brunch. This is probably I think the fourth or fifth time we've stopped. We drank too many liquids before we left. But we are making our go-to meal for these travel days which is a southwestern chopped salad from Trader Joe's and their traditional carnitas. Alright, about three more hours till Alpine. We made it to Alpine which is a small town in the high desert of West Texas, close to the popular town of Marfa and is a good jumping off point to visit Big Bend National Park which we aren't visiting this time but visited a few years ago when we first started our channel. And while Marfa is probably the most popular West Texas town, Alpine is pretty cool to visit. It has an authentic, small Texas town feel, a downtown area with some murals, local shops and restaurants, Sul Ross State University and views of the Davis and Glass Mountains. There are just so many cool, neat, beautiful murals all over this little town. Even the dumpsters have murals on them. Awww! Are you okay? Oh no! Well... Clearly we need this coffee because we don't have our stuff together but we just came to a really cool coffee shop in town called Cedar Coffee Supply and I spilled part of my precious drink but this coffee shop... I'm about to do it again. This table is super wobbly. But this is a really, really cool coffee shop. We always love when small towns have super high quality, trendy coffee shops. Inside the place is super nice and kind of like a minimalism design and the coffee looks super good too. Hopefully not too good because then I'll be extra sad that I spilled some of it. Thankfully she spilled her own coffee. Jeez. But we both got lattes. She got a salted caramel, which is classic Catherine and I got a white chocolate latte, which is not classic for me. But it's classically delicious. That is so good. It's going to become a classic. Oh, that is the perfect amount of saltiness and sweetness. We are really, really tired right now so this is very much needed. Especially because we're going on a short hike next and right now we'd rather just go to sleep. One of the top things to do here in Alpine is to hike up Hancock Hill, which starts at Seoul Ross State University and it has an interesting item at the top that we're going to hike up to. We made it to our first stop, although this isn't what I was referring to before. This is pretty dang quirky. This is the bicycle tree. I think I might pick one out to ride back down to the van. Maybe this tricycle laying here. The real item that we came up here for is this desk! Not only is this desk super unique and probably has the best view of any desk I've ever sat on, at least, it has a really interesting story behind it. So back in 1981 Seoul Ross student and track runner Jim Kitchen used to come up here all the time and one day thought to himself, it would be really cool to have a desk up here to study. So he got two of his friends to help him lug this desk up here and soon he was coming up here all the time. He would occasionally write down some thoughts in a notebook and then one day someone wrote back in the notebook which started this big tradition of having a notebook up here. There's all these notes just in this drawer and now people come here, write all their thoughts. And this desk, not this exact one, I've heard they've changed it a few times, has been up here for 40 years now. And as you can see people love to leave their mark, sit on it. It's a very very cool and unique, unexpected thing here in Alpine. It says this notebook was left here on December 7th, 2021. So it's really new. And it has so many messages in it. What should we write? Journey to Alaska. Boom! We have now left our mark at the desk. We drove a beautiful 40 minutes to near Fort Davis to sleep at our rest area for the night. Cooked up some dinner. Another one of our favorites from Trader Joe's. We promise this video is not sponsored by Trader Joe's. We just love Trader Joe's and we're sad we're not going to see one for maybe like three or four weeks. But this is a shawarma chicken with two different sauces that they have at the store and then some veggies. Tastes better than it looks, we promise. But we are going to devour this. We are so tired. We're going to hit the hay and then tomorrow we're going to explore a little bit of this area. Our first stop today in Fort Davis is the Fort Davis National Historic Site. For many years this area was home to Mescalero Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowa Indians. And starting in the mid-1800s travelers began to make their way through the area on the San Antonio-El Paso road with hopes of reaching the gold fields in California. Their arrival caused tension with the Apaches who targeted them and their supplies since resources were limited in the area which caused the army to create Fort Davis. In order to protect these travelers, many battles between the Mescaleros and troops continued for years before the Mescaleros moved to a reservation in New Mexico. So there's two versions of Fort Davis. There's a pre- and post-Civil War version and during the Civil War it was occupied by Confederate troops for about a year and then the Union troops took it over and destroyed most of it. So what you see now is the second version post-Civil War of Fort Davis. And the fort is now considered one of the best remaining examples of a frontier military post in the American Southwest and has five buildings that are restored to the 1880s as well as a hundred ruins and foundations. For breakfast we had beef hash, dry sliced bread and coffee. For dinner, sliced beef, dry bread and coffee. For supper, coffee straight, just dry bread and coffee. The food was very poor. Another important part of Fort Davis history was that from 1867 to 1885, buffalo soldiers actually served here. Buffalo soldiers were black army soldiers who mainly served on the western frontier. Some historians suggest they got their name from Native Americans comparing their hair to the hair of buffalo. Their routine duties here included tending animals, constructing and repairing buildings and they rode and walked thousands of miles pursuing the Comanches and Apaches. Really cool unexpected thing about Fort Davis is that we keep hearing all these bugle calls and they keep happening pretty randomly. We keep looking at the clock and we're kind of confused but we just found this schedule and it tells you what each one means and they happen at different intervals and basically what a bugle call was was a way that the commanders could regulate activities around the fort. So we just heard one that was the fatigue call and the sick call should be happening any second now. They've been playing music for about five minutes now and you can hear the commander speaking over the intercom right now. I think at some point you can hear like horse hooves and everything. It just really makes you feel immersed in this experience like you're actually a soldier back in the 1800s living here. There's a handful of trails at the park that take you up to this ridge and we just took the very short and very steep hike up to this overlook and the view walking up to it now is pretty cool. You can see the ruins so much better from up here. You just get to see the layout of what buildings used to be there and you can't get that type of perspective from eye level. You have to be above. This gives you the bird's eye or drone's eye view. Helps you really visualize what this place looked like at its peak. We've loved the mix of ruins, kind of restored buildings but kind of falling apart and then the restored buildings. It just kind of helps you see this place through like different timelines essentially. This park has been awesome. It's not very busy. There's so much to see and learn. We barely scratched the surface of what all there is to learn here but and the view. Yeah this is really cool. Nice little cool feature being able to get up here and see the surrounding mountains not just the Fort. It's a great view up here. Just down the road from Fort Davis actually so close that you can hike between the two is Davis Mountain State Park which overlooks the Davis Mountains which is the largest mountain range here in Texas. There are a few different things you can do here. You can go for a hike. They have a lodge you can stay at or you can drive the Skyline Drive Scenic Drive which we were originally going to hike but we're kind of tired and we have a long drive ahead of us later today so we're just going to do the Scenic Drive and stop at some of the overlooks and hopefully see some awesome views. This road is pretty dang steep. Skyline Drive was short but sweet. It was awesome to just be able to drive up here and get all those views. You can just see all the surrounding mountains. It's just beautiful up here. We actually never visited West Texas until we moved away to Seattle and then we came back on a visit and then took a trip out here and we fell in love with it then. We wish we could spend more time out here. It's just full of gems. It's beautiful. But for now we are leaving the Fort Davis area and driving about three hours northwest to our final stop here in Texas the city of El Paso which is the westernmost point in the state and is located right on the U.S. and Mexico border. We first visited El Paso almost exactly three years ago and one thing that Adam and Kona got to do last time but I didn't because I had to work is hike at Franklin Mountain State Park. The state park is located just north of downtown El Paso and is said to be one of the largest urban parks in the entire U.S. Last time Kona and I hiked the Aztec Cave Trail in the snow which was a lot of fun but this time we are hiking to the Tin Mines Trail which is 6.6 miles and it takes you to the only tin mine ever in the United States which is pretty cool. But another fun fact about this trail here or fun I guess little twist is you got to be careful where you step at least off trail so do not go off trail because there could be left over unexploded munitions. So a little bit of history about the mine it was founded in 1909 and at least 27 shafts and trenches were dug however it was proven uneconomical when only 160 100 pound pigs of tin were recovered and it was closed in 1915. We're about 3.3 miles into the hike. The hike started out very just kind of rocky but a very like steady incline but towards the end of the hike because we're really close it gets really really steep and kind of like that slick dirt but we didn't find our first evidence we think of a mine it's some like metal grating we're not totally sure what it is but we should be to the actual mine very very soon. So we've reached what we think is the end of the hike or what it shows on all trails and we're just kind of at this wash or this creek here we're not 100% sure where this mine is but I guess we'll keep looking around we did read on all trails some reports some people said they had trouble finding it but some people said like oh it was super easy so a little confusing we thankfully have one bar of service so we were able to look into the hike a little bit more and reading more reviews on all trails it actually turns out that where that grate was that we said was the first evidence of the mine is actually how you get into the mine there's an entrance over there somewhere so we're going to backtrack a bit so if you're following the all trails app you don't want to go to where the trail ends on the map because that takes you here you just want to stop a little bit before that alright let's try this again so when you're hiking up and you get to this little tee you can go left to the grate looking deals or you can keep going up we figured you had to keep going up so let's try this not going to lie now that we are back here this looks pretty obvious but the deceiving thing is there's a little door that I saw on google to get into it is on the back side of it so it's not super obvious in that way this is nuts oh yeah that's dark oh it goes for quite a bit this is amazing what are you afraid of? mountain lions? so we've mentioned before but we love this youtube channel called ghost town living it's a guy named brent underwood who lives in a ghost town and goes on mine explorations all the time and this is really making us feel like we're brent right now so he just goes through all these mines miles and miles just by himself with a better headlamp than this and multiple backups but he just goes it's completely dark like if you turn this off it's nothing oh wow there's another room it really keeps going but I think I think we've gotten the experience I'm done get out of here while we were there we had the mine completely to ourselves but as we were leaving a group of police officers showed up and it looked like they had a bunch of gear with them helmets, harnesses so it looked like they were going to do a little bit of spelunking in there but this is a really cool feature of this hike it's cool that you can just go and they leave it open for anybody to explore there's also we saw a picture of at least one other entrance into it so if you have time and you want to poke around you can maybe find some other ways into it but I'm getting hungry, we're both getting hungry and I've had enough of dark places for today one of our favorite things about El Paso is all of the delicious food being located on the Mexico border there's amazing Mexican food here and on past trips we've been to the very popular L&J cafe as well as a place called El Taquito but today you're trying a new spot called Kiki's Mexican Restaurant and we're here for one item in particular, not this one it's called brisket machaca traditionally machaca is a seasoned and dried beef which is then rehydrated and then pounded into a tender texture and actually that's where it gets its name machacar in Spanish means to pound it originated on the ranches in northern Mexico and it was served cold but here at Kiki's they warm it up right off the grill covered in cheese here you get rice and beans and then underneath here looks like there's peppers ooh a lot of cheese peppers, there's an egg in here somewhere, here's some egg oh yeah, this looks so good oh the flavor on that is excellent it's just got like a awesome like tender, smoky kind of delicious taste very savory, little bit of spice on the seasoning of the beef but then like this creamy sauce kind of offsets a little bit of that spiciness, this is super good so since that dish has eggs in it I decided just to get some brisket enchiladas with their green sauce on top which is kind of like a cheesy green sauce, it looks delicious I don't think they mess around when it comes to making everything super saucy here and I love things saucy, this is so good, and I have the brisket as well and you can see that it's very like shredded looking but I do need to try Adam's real quick the meat almost has like a grilled taste in yours compared to mine, yours tastes like it's been grilled a bit, so good for our final stop in El Paso we're at a unique spot called Casa de Azucar which means sugar house in Spanish, it's actually the home of a man named Rufino Loya who moved here to El Paso from Ciudad Juarez the home didn't quite look like him and his wife's dream home so he told her that he would start to fix it up, starting in 1973 he began decorating the outside of the house by chiseling cement into different intricate designs mostly inspired by their trips to Mexico it took him 25 years to make it what it is today and it got the nickname Casa de Azucar because his creations look like something made out of sugar or like a wedding cake, I am so mind blown that he did this out of cement everything is just so detailed and gorgeous and this is honestly one of the sweetest and just most romantic gestures I've ever heard of someone doing. After three days and over 600 miles we are officially leaving Texas and next up the camera setup is very heavy, we're gonna have killer muscles I'm singing in the shower, yeah we're halfway there whoa