The beach after we arrived through the rainstorm.

We made what for us was a mad dash across the South to reach the Pacific Ocean: 2,946 miles in 12 days.

After our two nights in Selma, Ala., we headed down to I-10 and across Louisiana and East Texas. We went through Del Rio and then on to Fort Davis, where we spent two nights with our friend Dedie Taylor, who seems to know just about everybody in Fort Davis and Marfa.

You aren’t allowed to take photos inside the Chinati Foundation, so I took one looking in from the outside. This building houses 15 of Donald Judd’s milled aluminum installations.

Dedie took us the Chinati Foundation, an art museum created by Donald Judd, a minimalist artist who abandoned New York for Marfa. Chinati occupies an old military base. We went through two large buildings that contained 100 large boxes in milled aluminum created by Judd. The boxes are all the same size but each one is different, and many of them produce optical illusions that have you looking from different angles to figure out how he did it. Chinati also has 15 even larger concrete installations by Judd marching across the landscape. We also went into some rooms that created unusual effects using light. Chinati has works by several other artists that are available on guided tours.

On our way out of Fort Davis, we stopped at another art installation, Prada Marfa, a Prada shop along the highway in the middle of the desert.

After a lovely visit with Dedie, we got back on the road, driving through a dust storm and then a rainstorm to Lordsburg, N.M., where our campsite was a sea of mud, and then on to Quartzsite, Ariz., where it was drier. Yesterday we drove across Southern California in another rainstorm and arrived at a Ventura County campground on the ocean.

We are taking a day here to rest up and enjoy the view. Then we will be heading up the coast, visiting family along the way. 

Looking north from our campground on the California coast.