11-14 Fort Stockton & Odessa Meteor Crater

I've been driving for the last two days with not much sightseeing, so no postings.  Today, however, I left Fort Stockton, TX, and decided to stop at a couple of places that looked interesting. 

The first is the Annie Riggs Museum.  Annie Riggs was a lady who had had  two husbands and 10 children.  She divorced both husbands, but ended up getting enough money from the last husband to buy a hotel in Fort Stockton where she finished raising her kids and operated for many years.  It is now a museum.

Mostly, the museum was filled with the usual stuff, but a found a couple of things I thought were interesting, including this sidesaddle that was in very good condition. 

 

 No, this is not a potty chair.  It is a slow cooker, per the sign in the next photo.  The stone in the bottom was put on the cook stove to be heated up and then placed at the bottom of this insulated case.  A pan of something was placed on top of the stone and the top closed.  (There are two side-by-side compartments.)

I thought this safe was interesting. 

And this is the kind of strongbox that was carried on stagecoaches.

A little later, but an interesting telephone switchboard.

The hotel had an inside courtyard on three sides. Each room opened either into the courtyard or to the outside porches.

The building is amazing because it was made of adobe and is still standing. Here is a close-up of the walls.

The hotel is really a very large building for its age.  Must have been a busy place at one time.

Next, I drove about 60 miles to nearby Odessa, TX.  This part of Texas is amazingly flat with nothing buy scrub and lots of oil pumps, so it is a pretty boring drive, although there are bluffs to occasionally break up the view.

This is supposed to be the third largest meteor crater in the U.S. and was created about 63,000 years ago.    

It is hard to tell that this is a crater because it has been mostly filled in with dirt, but you should be able to see the shape here. 

This 160 shaft was dug to try to find the main meteor mass, which they believe weighed 350 tons, but the dig was unsuccessful.  It is now covered with cement slabs to protect it.

You can see the rim slightly in this photo looking from the center to the visitor center in the distance.

It ended up being a longer day than I expected, but I arrived just before dark at a lake north of Carlsbad, NM.  Nice view, huh??