Day 27: Junction to Anthony

We continued on I-10 towards El Paso and found ourselves on a sparcely populated stretch of highway. The rolling hills turned into desert mesas. According to my Roadside Geology book, the entire area has the same kind of rock. The difference is rain fall. Evidently more rain rounds and greens things. There is a striking difference.

Towns are getting smaller and farther apart. We passed by an exit for Ozona which, according to my AAA book, is the only town in the whole of Crockett County. (Named for Davey who died in the Alamo.) And Crockett is the 8th largest county in Texas.

The country varied from hills to flats and back again many times. It's sort of like Houston -- there is no zoning. After Ozona, we saw groups of mountains (like those island mountains in Montana) then flats that looked like plains, then hills. The country is getting more arid. No trees. Just sagebrush, cactus, and, strangely enough, palm trees -- although short ones (cleaverly disguised as palm bushes.) It appears that the height of a palm tree depends on how much water it gets. The palm trees that are in areas with water(motels, yards, etc.) are tall.

At this point it seemed that it was just our Nissan and trucks on the highway -- and not all that many of them. Trucks have a speed limit of 70; cars of 80. So we found ourselves playing a game of truck leapfrog. I-20 from Dallas joined I-10 adding more trucks to play with.

Van Horn was the last town before El Paso (100+ miles beyond). So we got off the freeway to look at Van Horn and get some gas. We took the business loop and discovered that town was essentially one road with a line of motels on one side and railroad tracks on the other. The motels were of the "economy" flavor, old ones, one-story variety. "Hotel Alley" was lined by a row of street lights that looked like they should be in a high-end housing development on the motel side of the street. This must have looked very interesting at night.

We decided to go on to El Paso and arrived about an hour or so later. There are 500,000 folks in El Paso. After travelling in the wilderness for the last 2 days, the sudden appearence of civilization rising out of the desert was a shock to our system. We planned to stop on the south side of town, but found ourselves in the middle of a huge shopping area, and encountered those nasty veer on's and veer off's that we will always remember Texas for.

So we went on. Then we saw the oncoming traffic at a halt, going through some sort of checkpoint. It didn't look promising. But we passed by the exit for Mexico and went through down town with no problem thanking our lucky stars we weren't going south through town. We kept going all the way to mile 0 and got off at Anthony, Texas.

Coming up on El Paso we followed the Rio Grande and could see Mexican mountains in the distance. Hard as we looked though, we couldn't really see the river -- just a glimpse here and there. So after we checked settled in, we went for a drive towards the river. And there it was: the Rio Grande. We crossed over into New Mexico -- no passports required -- and drove around the part of Anthony that was in New Mexico. We saw cotton fields and El Paso in the distance under the backdrop of the mountains. Quite picturesque and a good way to end the day.