If it's Saturday, it must be Big Spring

Hi again everyone. Tonight we are at a nice Walmart in Big Spring, Texas. We left Tucson on Good Friday morning at about 9:30 a.m., and headed east on Interstate 10. We were kind of sad leaving Tucson, which had become like home to us. But, the world beckons.

Our first port of call was El Paso, Texas, and we had in mind a place like in the movie The Getaway, with Steve McQueen. What it really is, is a big, dirty industrial city. The smog rolls in from Mexico, which we can see on the other side of the border fence in the middle of El Paso. The sister city is called Juarez. There are many US manufacturers running plants in Juarez, to escape the highly regulated US, and the high payroll costs here. We pulled into the Walmart in El Paso, to find the parking lot jammed, and people coming and going at a furious pace. We were able to park, but were afraid to put our big slide out in case someone ran into it. This place was crazy! The traffic continued all night, waking us up at 2:00 a.m. What are all these people buying at that hour?

We made an executive decision to pull out early in the morning, drive to the next rest area on the highway, and relax over a nice breakfast there. And that is what we did. We left at around 7 am, or was it 6? The parking lot was teeming with shoppers already, so we headed back to the Interstate, and drove about 40 miles to a nice little rest stop. We put out our dining room slide, and Marlene cooked up a nice breakfast of scrambled eggs with ham, cheese, tomato, onion, etc.

Thus replete, we rolled back onto the highway. It is windy, and I'm fighting the motorhome all day long as we head east, then northeast. We pass by quite a few ghost towns, all of them looking like they died in the 70's. Then we drove through Pecos. This seemed an interesting place, with old buildings visible, and nice aura to it. We eventually reached Odessa, where we filled up with gas ($2.79 a gallon here) for a total of 65 gallons. We had covered 444 miles since our last fill, so we're doing about 7 mpg in the wind, towing the trailer.

We passed through Midland, TX. the hometown of George W. Bush and his lovely wife Laura. We didn't stop to see the library though. We were headed for Big Spring, and didn't realize we would have to drive about 5 miles off the interstate to find the Walmart, but we were pleasantly surprised to find a busy, but not crazy store with ample empty parking spots. We snagged a spot at the side of the store, along a green belt. To pay our way, we went into the store and bought some Sharpie markers (for autographs) and a pair of driving gloves, to aid my sore hands from fighting the crosswinds.

Tomorrow we continue northeast. It will take us 3 days to drive across Texas. This is a big state, and we have seen our fill of sand, scrub, and oil wells. We're looking forward to Arkansas and Tennessee. Stay tuned...