I have been planning on doing this road trip for a while and since August is a sleepy month there is no time like the present to get on the road. My first major stop was in Marfa Texas for a heavenly night in a safari tent at the El Cosmico hotel. On the way to Marfa I stopped at Irma’s Restaurant in Deming New Mexico where I had amazing enchiladas and guacamole for breakfast. I highly recommend this place if you’re driving through. It’s just off the 10 East and worth a stop. My road trip is all about food and locals so once I got to Marfa I had dinner at Cochineal with one of the town’s best fixtures who it turned out was friends with my friends in LA. They suggested I look up Boyd Elder, whose family apparently owned the land where the Prada Marfa installation sits and he is the caretaker of the spot. He is also an artist and designed the first Eagles cover and knows everyone in town, and it seems everywhere else. He had a lot of interesting stories, some of them even included Patti Smith and Donald Judd, who was one of the first to come to Marfa and start the transformation of the town into the arts scene it has become now. Sitting at Cochineal felt like a night in Malibu or Upstate NY or the Hamptons and was packed with artists, collectors and their fans which, is kind of the vibe here. More on Boyd and some of the other locals I met later. I’m taking as many portraits as I can on the road of everyone I meet. El Cosmico was cute and a lot of fun. Be ware of the mud puddles. If you fall into one at night the shower may or may not work and you may or may not have to clean yourself via bird bath. If you laugh and fall again and look at it from a differnt perspective it may feel like a great exfoliant scrub for the body. Off to Austin and Atlanta to visit some Bard friends and eat BBQ.
