Avoid Highways – Not The Painter

March 19, 2023 — Day 32

We work up in a new time zone, so it was a slow start. But I kept on hearing a bird I didn’t recognize. There were lots of crows, but there was another one in there. So I got up, got dressed and went outside.

I’m not sure if I was more surprised by the birds or the water, you see, the field wasn’t flooded when we went to sleep! We got two new life birds, the Long Billed Curlew and the Cattle Egret, so that was nice. Oh there was also about 1,000 other birds.

We headed out with the GPS to “Avoid Highways” and went south on Route 28 to El Paso, avoiding Interstate 10. Route 28 was nice, I put on Phillip Glass’s Mishima. Susan doesn’t like Phillip Glass but she figured I was driving in the wind so I could listen to what I wanted. It fit the surreal scenery until we hit the outskirts of El Paso which was pretty rundown on the north west side. Then we saw Mexico!

Further down that border road you could see through the fence alongside the highway into Mexico. The fencing made all the photos blurry so you’ll have to take our word on how vivid the colors of the houses were there.

Soon El Paso turned into the typical strip malls and chain stores associated with the outskirts of cities: car dealerships, fast food, and all the same stores we have back home. This was an unexpected side affect of choosing “Avoid Highways,” we wanted to see small town America but we found up seeing the same urban blight that we see at home. So what do the intrepid explorers do? We stopped to eat of course!

We pulled into a Whataburger. We had seen them around and figured we try it. My burger was disappointing but Susan’s chicken sandwich was pretty good! It also had table service. You placed your order and they brought it to you, along with a tray of condiments!

But, it eventually stopped and we headed out into the desert country side, it was gorgeous.

About 30 miles or so out of El Paso the sign warns us, no gas for 128 miles. Huh? Shouldn’t that sign have been at the last gas out of El Paso? The speed limit was mostly 75 and we were doing 60-65 because of the wind. I backed it down to 55 just to save gas. (This was really effective, we pulled into the gas station with 1/4 tank remaining. Second call to GoodSam—an RV AAA type service—was avoided.

There is an awful lot of nothing out here. New England has that also in northern New Hampshire and Maine, but here the nothing goes on for miles and miles, hours actually. It is so flat except for the mountains in the distance. You see a lot of abandoned houses, however a hike through the woods in NH you’ll find hundreds of old stone foundations. I guess people try to live everywhere and often don’t make it.

Soon we were passing some salt flats, they were pretty cool.

We had been approaching the Guadalupe Mountains for about a hundred miles and their beauty is hard to capture from the passenger seat, but also hard to capture from a camera.