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Tuesday, December 17, 2013

A foggy morning at the golf course

Although we didn't get as cold as some during the last couple of wintry storms that have passed through, we did get down to freezing at night a couple of times and had a little bit of rain off and on.
The moisture in the air made for some foggy mornings. Rather pretty!

But James doesn't let some fog keep him from playing so out we go:

Hitting some balls on the driving range while giving the fog some time to leave the area.

We even had 'a river run through it'

After the fog cleared we enjoyed another beautiful morning on the, mostly empty, course. No wind at all, which makes for nice reflections in the pond on #3.

Let me show you a little more about the golf course. This is the clubhouse:

It actually is a historical building, it was a trading post in the good old 'Wild West' days (around 1900) when Lajitas was established.

If you look closely you can still see the bullet holes in the outside walls of the building which they left uncovered when they renovated and turned it into a clubhouse.

Besides the golf shop it nowadays also houses the Lajitas Longhorn Museum! Talking about odd!

Apparently this local guy, Fayette Yates, a third generation Texas longhorn raiser, Historian and Texas Longhorn expert, collected over 1,000 Texas Longhorn Mounts (skull and horn, horn and full body) of Texas Longhorn Cattle. After he died in 2007 his horn-ucopia was bought and moved to Lajitas.
The museum has about 500 sets of the horns on display in five rooms (plus the bathrooms!) of the Trading Post.
There isn't another collection this size anywhere on Earth!

It also features the head mount of the famous Texas Longhorn steer "Amigo Yates," current World Champion longest horned Texas Longhorned steer, with a confirmed live measurement of 8 ft. 9 1/2inches. His horn spread out distanced past champion "Old Tex" by almost one foot.

That's 'Amigo Yates' in the middle

Right next to the clubhouse there's the Ocotillo restaurant. It's a beautiful building on the outside and, as far as we could see, also on the inside but unfortunately it's only used for big groups, retreats, etc.

So far we haven't seen it used once, which really is a shame. Not only is the building very nice but the view is incredible, looking out over the Rio Grande and into the mountains of Mexico.
It's actually standing on another historical site, the ruins of the Ivey House, built as a family homestead in 1946 by a Mr Ivey.

Apparently the bathroom of the building was bullet proof so as to serve as a safe room for his wife and kids to take shelter on wild Saturday nights when guns could be fired around the Trading Post next door, in any directions and for any reasons.

Oh yeah, definitely the 'good old days' !

Talking about those days, on the 5th of December I made an attempt to get somewhat in the 'Sinterklaas' mood.
Something that I have to say gets more difficult each year.
As some of you might remember from previous blogs it's an old dutch tradition. It's sort of a 'Santa Claus'-christmas equivalent.
It's just hard to keep it up when it's not celebrated anywhere around you.
At least I baked the traditional speculaas, although I was out of the store-bought special spice-mix it takes, so I had to mix some up myself!

Which was actually surprisingly easy! There are numerous recipes available on the Internet and although I didn't have exactly all the right spices (it takes a lot) it came out great!

Ofcourse we also celebrated Thanksgiving!
There's quite some more holidays to celebrate if you combine 2 cultures!

I didn't have to cook since the Resort put out a great buffet-lunch for employees!
It was pretty good, turkey with all the trimmings and such but I'd baked an apple cranberry pie myself, just because it's our favorite for the season, and for the evening we made a poo poo platter with some nice cheeses, humus and, James favorite, devilled eggs!