The Interstate 20 across Texas does not count as my favorite travel route in the US. But our need to get to the East Coast makes this the best alternative. It is going east all the time and it runs through an area with warmer weather than what we would find farther north. Another benefit of it is that we don't have to climb across a major mountain range. We have gone that route earlier and are kind of familiar with it.
So this morning we left Portal,AZ at our usual "we-are-ready-time", which is 7:45am what ever local time zone we are in.
As our own tradition commands it, we stopped at the "Roadrunner Rest Area" high above Las Cruces. I have shown and described the statue of the roadrunner in an earlier posting. It is fascinating to see what garbage can used for.
Then we rolled down to the city, which is the southern-most in the State of New Mexico, before Interstate 10 runs into Texas at El Paso.
El Paso never fails to make us gasp at its steady growth year over year. We call them "Spaghetti Highways" when their intersections are built like a crescendo of roads crossing each other at multiple levels of height.
Today's crossing of El Paso went well, even with that mind-boggling amount of Saturday morning traffic we had to deal with. After roughly 45minutes and some 55kms we reached the southern end of what looks like a never ending mass of industrial and residential areas. |
| Border Patrol Check Point ahead |
So now we were back into the desert, endless plains with sand and typical desert vegetation. Fabens is a place containing of a few spread buildings and a truck stop. We took a lunch break there and topped our diesel.
At some point the I-10 gets us to the beginning of the I-20, but before that, it climbs high, passing Sierra Blanca, a small town surrounded by mountain tops and high desert. Reaching Van Horn, yet quite a bit higher in elevation, it plateaus, now approaching the intersection with the I-20.
We had phoned the Balmorhea State Park and were told they still had 2 sites available for a one-night-stay. Now, Balmorhea is a few miles down from the I-20 intersections and along I-10. But we had been there years ago and found their overnight rate affordable. Besides, we wanted a place where we could walk Dixie without wading in the usual garbage of a rest area. For the next morning departure we only have to follow Hwy 17 which eventually gets us up to the I-20.
Balmorhea State Park once was a quaint park with simple RV-sites in a natural setting. Over the last 2 years it has gone through "upgrades" which pretty much changed it from a natural setting into a place with paved roads, concrete pads and a city-like atmosphere. And while doing that the planners ignored that bigger rigs might want to come which would need slacker curves and room for wide turns. So not the ideal place for us and our 65ft total length. But someone with a Van or small class C would be fine here. Yet, I find sites are built too close to each other.
So today we drove 365miles (587km) and I was doing a lot better than on our first travel day.
After that, things can get ugly, at least after reaching New Jersey and north of there. A violent winter storm has just dumped tons of snow all the way along the coast and into Canada. How we are gonna make out with that is everybody's guess. But we need to get home.
