Day Three - El Paso to Shreveport

Leaving El Paso

I had the exact opposite sleeping issue as the day before.  I actually overslept and woke up at four fifteen.  Sounds early, but don't forget, there's a two hour difference from my normal schedule.  Luckily, I wrote most everything in the blog post the night before.  By the time I hit the road, it was around six-thirty, but both the car and I had full bellies.  Considering the recent weather, getting off to a late start was not such a bad thing.  Day was breaking as I was leaving, so I had better visibility of the road in case there was any ice left on the surface.  It turns out the roads were fine, and I made my way back into the desert.

I never knew Texas had such mountains.  I've spent plenty of time in Texas for work, and all I remember is flat.  Dead flat in fact, other than Canyon, Texas.  The second biggest canyon in the US (Palo Duro Canyon) is in Canyon, and it is impressive.  The only thing is, it's not mountainous.  It's still dead flat, just with a big gaping gorge in it, cut by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River.

Amazing Striations from the Snow

Driving through the mountains of Southwest Texas is mighty impressive.  You don't get to stop and sightsee much, since the speed limit is eighty miles per hour, but the formations are big enough to see them for quite a while.  Every time I came around a corner or through a pass, I couldn't help but say "wow" over and over.  The drive from El Paso to the I-10/I-20 junction was full of surprises.

As I was eating breakfast at the hotel, I saw on the news that the I-10/I-20 junction had been shut down due to the snow the day before.  They also mentioned that the trucks parked along I-40 throughout the snowstorm on my originally planned route were just getting back on the road and causing traffic problems.  Again...glad I decided to stay south.

Partway down I-10 there was a point where the speed limit started dropping, and I thought I was in yet another construction zone.  There were cones everywhere diverting traffic off to what looked like a weigh station.  Since the highway runs right along the Mexican border, this was a border patrol stop.  Two officers and a canine were on duty.   They made the van in front of me stop to get a quick look in the windows before letting him pass.  They just waved me through.  I guess they figured you can't fit many Mexicans in a clownshoe.   Figuring they would not be amused,  I didn't take any pictures.

Just after I made my way onto the high plains, one of the first exits I came to was a ghost town.  It was one one of the eeriest things I've ever seen.  I didn't stop because I had already passed the exit.  As I was passing over the town, you could see that there was not a single car to be seen.  The town wasn't all that small either, so I wonder what made it fail?  It looked like there hadn't been any activity in this town for thirty or so years.  I'm kind of glad I didn't stop.  Who knows what's down there?

Thousands of Wind Turbines!

Remnants of the storm were apparent.  Dozens of vehicles were still abandoned alongside the road, though most of the snow had released them from its grip.  I saw snow along the roads for the first four to five hundred miles of the drive.  Even in the high plains around Midland, the side roads were covered in heavy slush.

As you drive into Midland, if the thousands of oil rigs don't give it away, the smell does.  The place just smells like money.  In the form of crude oil of course.  And just down the road in Sweetwater, a very different energy source; wind.  As you drive through here, there are turbines as far as the eye can see for miles and miles.  I can't fathom how much capital it took to erect all these things.  It has to be in the billions of dollars based on what I saw.  Since all the wind is here where nobody lives, and all the people are on the coasts, how do they get all that power out of here and to the people that can use it?  There were no power lines or distribution networks that I could see.  Hmmm, the conspiracy theorists must love this.

The rest of the trip wasn't that eventful.  Driving the plains of Texas is just flatness and white pickup trucks.  I guess since most people work in their trucks, and white reflects the heat, everybody drives white pickup trucks.  I hit Dallas at around rush hour and it wasn't horrific, then made it into Shreveport around eight-thirty PM.