6th Jan – 9th Jan 2022
Some sections of our journey are about seeing a place. Some are about stopping and resting. Some are about just getting from A to B. This next bit for us, after leaving the ranch, was about putting some miles in. Hampson-style. A leisurely fashion it is then.
A wise RV’ing veteran once told us to stick to the “Rule of 2” for touring:
- Don’t travel more than 200 miles in a day
- Arrive at your destination by 2pm
- Stay at least 2 days.
We generally do stick to this mantra, but the next few days were an exception with a run of one-nighters. This isn’t really compatible with doing much sightseeing at our destinations but we get to see an awful lot of the world go by from the truck windows, which after all is what a roadtrip is all about.
Our drive after leaving the ranch involved a 45 mile back-track up the road away from the border, a brief stop to refuel at the petrol station/hardware store/grocery store/bottle shop at the junction, then hanging a right to continue our easterly journey. Tuscon was the nearest civilisation but, having spent time there in the past, we breezed on through and joined the main southerly East-West interstate highway, the I-10. Our next destination was a stop-off at a nice park in a town called Wilcox alongside this road. This stop was to restock (the food supplies), rest (the bodies and livers), refresh (everything that needed laundering) and rehydrate (our dry, desert, lizard-like skin in the pool). Yes! Finally the temperature had pushed into the mid-late 20s deg C and we, whilst waiting for our four loads of laundry, broke out the bikinis and lounged in & around the park’s very lovely heated swimming pool. Desert winters. Hot days, freezing nights. Just weird, man.
The evening delivered a magnificent sunset which coincided with a completely unexpected spectacle. There were thousands and thousands of large birds flying across the sky in V-formation after V-formation, as far as the eye could see. A quick internet search informed us that they were Sandhill Cranes and between 20,000 and 40, 000 of them migrate here each winter to the wildlife area at Wilcox. Each evening at sunset they return from their daytime feeding grounds ready to roost for the night. The town’s wildlife association even has an annual birding and nature festival centred around the cranes called Wings Over Wilcox. It was magical, but entirely impossible to capture on camera, so you’ll just have to use your imaginations!
Our I-10 journey continued the next day and we crossed into our next state, New Mexico. It bills itself as the Land of Enchantment and it does feel a bit different here. The terrain is much the same as Arizona: huge flat wide valleys covered in scrubland with distant mountain ranges, and this continues into West Texas. I don’t know why New Mexico feels a bit different, but remember, Roswell and Area 51 are here….cue Twilight Zone music… We also spent quite a lot of time here in 2018 so we were just passing through again. It was another lovely warm sunny day and we cruised through vast tracts of desert, empty except for the 4-lane highway. There were lots of signs warning that this area was subject to regular and heavy dust storms that could make driving very dangerous. Not today, thankfully. Our only stop in New Mexico was a night in Las Cruces at an RV park that we had stayed in last time. This is only the third RV park re-visit that we have made on our travels, the others being at the marina park in Duluth, Minnesota, close to the lift bridge that rang bells and sounded its hooter every time one of the many enormous cargo ships came into port, and a place under the flight path of the runway approach of Nellis Airforce base in Vegas. Both were considerably noisier.
At the gateway to the town stands a big sculpture of a roadrunner bird, made entirely of recycled materials. His underbelly is mainly white trainer tops and his plumage mostly cellphones. He was quite magnificent. Here our enthusiasm for a walk into town and dinner were low. We were still detoxing from the excesses of the Rancho and Nick was coming down with something…. A cold, or Omicron?? A rapid test was negative, but we were happy staying in and being lazy.
Our New Mexico passage was only a two day affair and the next day our travels took us into Texas which was going to be an altogether longer tarmac/tyre rubber relationship. The I-10 just continued on, and on, and on, through a flat dusty landscape, the road full of trucks and RVs. Everyone going somewhere, for some reason. Texas really is an enormous state. To put this into context: Texas is about 270,000 miles squared in area. The UK and NZ are about 95,000 and 105,000 miles squared respectively. Massive. We crossed the border from New Mexico and pretty quickly found ourselves charging along the urban hell highway through El Paso. This is a border town which is very ‘up close and personal’ with its close Mexican neighbour, Ciudad Juárez, which is just across the Rio Grande. The historically open and friendly relationship between the two cities has soured in recent times as gang and drug-related violence in Juárez has made it so dangerous that now there is very little traffic between the two cities.
Driving through on I-10 it was easy to see the border wall and the disparity of living standards. El Paso, although is in Texas, is in the Mountain Time Zone along with New Mexico and Arizona, and Central Time Zone didn’t begin until we were through the city and well out the other side. We stopped for fuel and sandwiches at a dubious and dusty petrol station with only one functioning pump and then pushed on.
This next section of road was quite remarkable in the story of this journey so far because…wait for it….I was allowed to drive! Nick does all the driving generally because a) he loves it, b) he is very good at it, c) he is a terrible passenger, d) we rarely travel far enough in one day to warrant me driving too. But I am very conscious that I need to be able to confidently drive Big D, especially if the situation might arise in times of stress, so every now and then I wrestle the driving seat away from his highness and refresh my skills. I am brilliant too.
Our first Texas stop was the third of three single-nighters in a place called Van Horn. It is a modest sized place named for a Lt. James Judson Van Horn who commanded a garrison here in 1859 (which was taken only two years later by Confederate forces.) Its future was cemented by the arrival of the railroad in 1881. It is now probably best known as the site of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space tourism company, which is located on a 290,000 tract of land only 25 miles north of the city. Van Horn also provided the inspiration for the 2019 titular song by alternative rock band Saint Motel.
The next morning we parted company with the I-10 and headed off South-West on US 90 into the even more remote desert yonder towards a very unusual town called Marfa.
Belated Happy New year to you both. Big Dave keeps eating up the miles while you provide an endless tale of fun and experience which any of us are likely fulfil for our selves. Well written , looking forward to the next episode and to seeing you both when you return to Oswestry. Eric and Jeni.