Tonight we are in Midland, Texas - the ugliest town we have experienced in our 1+ years of travel. It is extremely windy today and as we approached Midland, about 20 miles out, the haze from rising dust made the area look like the pictures from the 30's dust storms. What area that has not been plowed, and is now blowing away, has oil tanks and "sippers" and, in the distance, the taller buildings of Midland are all shrouded in dust and dirt. So why are we here?

Three weeks ago, when we were in Austin, we took our car in for the 40,000 mile service. At that time we were told that all systems looked good. But, within about 300 miles, the "Check break pad wear"warning message appeared in the message box every time we turned on the car. We called Mercedes and were told that there were no service centers in Amarillo and the closest was 100 miles away in Lubbock. Unfortunately they could not accommodate us until the end of the week. The next closest service was in Midland, 210 miles away. They could do the work on Monday morning and have us on our way in a few hours. We drove down this afternoon, a little over 3 hours driving the speed limit of 75 mph.

But first we took a little hike.

The Rock Garden Trail is shown in orange on the map above. It goes from the bottom of the canyon to the top of the Fortress formation that we saw during the morning hike yesterday.

Here's the warning and the profile of the 5 mile round-trip hike. 

This was a new look at the Canyon for us.

This is in the "Rock Garden" portion of the hike - it is really a boulder field.

Views of the Canyon from up on top of the Fortress.

It was extremely windy up on top.

Beginning the trail down.

At least here you can see the trail.

Almost to the bottom Frederick saw this rattle-snake about ten feet in front of us on the trail. Using the zoom feature on the phone, we took this picture. It appeared to be a young snake, about 1/2 the size of the two other rattlers we have seen. We still gave it a wide berth.