Today we put another few hundred miles on the clock and…we found ourselves still in Texas. Odessa may just be a pit stop on our way to Arizona and California but we wanted to check out the local points of interest. When we searched the hotel’s displays and researched online, we found just two. The first of these was the Odessa Meteor Crater, which is apparently an impact crater 170 m in diameter. We set our sat nav for the second largest meteor crater in the USA and were somewhat surprised to draw up at the local hospice! Not saying our Tom Tom is rubbish but….on deeper investigation than instructions and addresses on the leaflets from the hotel, it appears the real deal is 20 miles away! No problem because also listed as a major point of interest is a replica of Stonehenge here on the campus of the University of Texas. It seems it was completed in 2004 and the replica is said to be horizontally equal to Stonehenge, although only 70% of the vertical height of the original. We were keen to see how this had been constructed – had they learned the art of moving huge stones from nearby mountains using primitive methods? Well, what can I say? I took the photos of the concrete slabs to prove we came and tomorrow we have the promise of a scenic drive to El Paso! Lots of laughs today 😂😂. Small American towns are so proud to offer their wonders to visitors but somehow Stonehenge it definitely wasn’t. Perhaps we might go to the cinema… oh look, even that had closed down.

Carolyn’s Curios and Curiosities

Odessa was very quiet and we didn’t realise until much later that, on 31 August, just over a fortnight before our visit, a gunman killed seven people and injured more than 20 in Odessa and Midland in western Texas. He had called the police on an FBI tip line, making “rambling statements” about being fired by his employer before he went on his drive-by mass shooting rampage, police.

Not knowing the recent history, I did look for a queue of people to photograph where I could have posted … “Filming the ‘Odessa File’! ” Seems totally inappropriate now.