Hotel El Capitan, Van Horn, Texas

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My hotel in Van Horn, Texas, is the Hotel El Capitan. It's a pretty cool place and was only a hour's drive from Guadalupe Mountains National Park, which was helpful since I crossed into the Central time zone a few miles after leaving the park and promptly lost an hour.

Here's a brief history of the hotel (from the hotel's website - edited for clarity):
Hotel El Capitan was built in 1930 by the Gateway Hotel Chain. The hotel was designed by famed architect Henry Trost and constructed by McKee Construction Company, all of El Paso. The hotel building is essentially the identical floor plan of its sister hotel, The Hotel Paisano, in Marfa, which is also owned by the Duncans. It was one of the five hotels built by the Gateway Hotels in Eastern New Mexico and West Texas. The other three hotels were located in Lordsburg and Carlsbad, New Mexico, and downtown El Paso. The hotels were built in an attempt to encourage tourism within 200 miles of El Paso. Trost studied architecture under Louis Sullivan in Chicago and was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright.
The hotel, typical of most Trost buildings, has a lobby with unique European tile on the floors and stairwells with finely crafted wrought iron banisters and exposed Spanish vigas lining the fourteen foot ceilings. The El Capitan has 49 rooms. Twelve rooms have French doors that open to private exterior balconies or patios which, like the Paisano, overlook a central Courtyard with a fountain centered around a treed landscape.

The fountain in the courtyard
A staircase in leading from the lobby to the first floor
The view of the courtyard from my room on the second floor

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