12th Jan- 14th Jan 2022
We left Marfa quite early (for us-9.30am) with the prospect of a long-ish drive of about 240 miles (thus breaking one of the Rules of Two). The day’s scenery served up mile upon mile of beautiful but desolate nothingness as we cruised down US-90, a road devoid of much traffic at all. We set off having no pre-planned destination for our stay that night, but the miracle of modern technology meant that I could book us a roost en route.
We were headed to Del Rio, another town kissing the Mexican border. Here the levels of illegal crossings has become so high that the National Guard had been draughted in to aid the control of the border. The town hit international news last year when 14,000 Haitians crossed here en masse and sheltered for days in blistering heat under a highway overpass in a makeshift camp with no access to adequate food and water. This would have been overwhelming even in a less conservative area of the country and now there has been a huge injection of manpower and machinery into Del Rio to stop it happening again. We saw whole RV parks commandeered to house National Guard troops in bunk house trailers and on the South-West side of town, nearest the Rio Grande and border there was a Humvee stationed with a couple of soldiers every mile or so along the roadside. Consequently this is one of the fastest growing cities in the country: Lots of people coming to live in Del Rio to stop the other people wanting to come to Del Rio. A difficult problem with a very expensive partial solution.
We had one night here. It was warm enough to sit outside out for sundowners in the evening sun,which was a real treat, and we had a good chat and mutual RV tours with our neighbours. They were here from California to visit their daughter and new grandchild. Their son-in-law’s job had brought the family to Del Rio. His profession? Border Patrol, of course! On our way along the road out of Del Rio we were stopped at one of the many immigration check points in the border areas. These are located away from the physical borders but along key roads that carries traffic that may have crossed into the USA illeagally or carrying contraband. Normally we are waved through these checkpoints but this time we were given the third degree. Unfortunately our passports were locked away in Tin Can and the Border Patrol officer wasn’t entirely reassured by our UK driving licences. Retrieval of our passports would have taken a good ten minutes and there was a queue building up behind us. He considered his options, obviously decided we were low risk for being illegal interlopers with a camper-full of bricks of cocaine, and waived us through with a brief lecture on how our passports should be close at hand when were are travelling close to the border. Suitably chastised we agreed wholeheartedly and continued on our way, completely forgetting his advice and never moving the passports as suggested.
Next stop along the way was a town called Cotulla. This is seemingly a scrap of a town in the middle of the desert flatlands of Southern Texas, but there is a disproportionate bustle about the place for its size. The town was founded in the late 1800s by a Prussian immigrant called Joseph Cotulla who started a ranching outfit here. On hearing that the railroad was planned to come through the area he rather brilliantly donated 120 acres of land to the railroad on which they established a depot, thus cementing the future of the town that bears his name. This town of only about 4,000 permenant residents thrives in current times as it is sits atop the Eagle Ford shale deposit and houses the largest sand fracking facility in North America, the area being the second largest producer of oil in the USA. The town has 16 hotels with a further 7 planned, all to accomodate workers and contractors. Everyone drives a massive truck, every second business is a petrol station. In this part of the world there are no concessions to climate change, no will to compromise Big Company wealth for a macro reduction in emissions, no infrastructure planning to change things in the future. Texas is oil.
Having thrashed down a very poor quality back road to get here, we finaly arrived, shaken-not-stirred in Cotulla. We had passed countless fracking sites, and (contaminated) water disposal sites along the way and those were just the ones visible from the road. Our camp here was large and mostly empty save for a few resident workers. It was visible from the main road but not easy to get to due to a side-road closure. We did several trips up and down the short stretch of highway that passed it, arguing with two forms of sat-nav and each other about how to get there. Eventually we worked it out and calm was restored. It was a beautiful afternoon and the camp had beautiful pool area. Swimwear was broken out again and suncream applied. This time, however, the pool was unheated so we just looked at it from our sun loungers. ‘Cold water swimming’ is very low down on my list of fun things to do.
The next morning we hit the road again and made our final push for what we felt was the true destination for this trip, the Gulf Coast. It was another lovely warm day and we were excited to be heading to the beach. We cruised on through the largish city of Corpus Christi, which was seeming one long strip mall, and crossed a bridge out to Mustang Island. This is one of many long thin barrier islands that run along this coast and home to our next stop: Port Aransas.