San Antonio to Tucson

People told us this was going to seem like a long, long trip and they certainly weren’t exaggerating. It is a long trip but it sure is an interesting one.

Bernie and I always think of Texas as flat, REALLY big and flat. It was quite a surprise when we got into West Texas. There are some extremely interesting spots out there. I think San Antonio to Tucson is around 550 miles. 550 miles of desolation. Last night we stayed in Van Horn Texas. The RV park manager was telling me about his cable TV. I explained that we were tired and I would just use our antenna and whatever was on the air. He laughed as he told me “there was no over the air out there” and in fact they could only get one radio station, intermittently. Ahh – the lights went on, we understood, until then we had been thinking our truck radio was fried.

That’s Texas. Despite being the second most populous state in the union (behind California) it’s so big there are places that radio and TV signals still don’t reach. It sounds unbelievable, we were just off of I-10, this is the US, we’re traveling an interstate highway, there has to be TV and radio. But he was right - nothing, 0, nada. It really served to point out the size of Texas.

It's no wonder nothing grows out here, there's no soil, it's all rock

We used to think the |Canadian Prairies were long and straight

We had an interesting drive through El Paso. It’s quite a sight to see. From I-10 you see it spread out in a shallow valley to the South. I’d love to see it at night. We didn’t even stop for coffee so we really didn’t see much, except Juarez Mexico. As we drove through Bernie commented “that must be a poor part of town.” Then we saw the border fence and we knew we were looking at Juarez. Yes Juarez, where drug lord’s and smugglers rule and everyone else has moved out. I had read that Juarez was practically deserted and in our brief encounter it sure did look like a ghost town. I wouldn’t cross the border there for anything.

I can’t believe we covered 500 miles since our last posting and I only having a couple of paragraphs to post. As you may know I can be much more verbose than this but there just wasn’t anything out there to write about.

This really is a long and desolate stretch of road but it's one we're really glad we had an opportunity to travel.  Would we do it again?  You bet.

So here we are in Arizona, just East of Tucson in Benson. It seems like a nice little place to hang out for the weekend. Tomorrow we’ll unload the Smart car and head for Tombstone.

More from Tombstone's "OK Corral" later.

Thanks for stopping by and please do leave a comment when you can.

Neal and Bernie