Las Cruces, NM to Odessa, Tx (Day 14 of Road Trip)

The rest stop at Las Cruces worked well for camping. Today we drove on to Odessa, Texas. We were on Highway 10 for the day. We will get on Hwy 20 tomorrow morning for our next leg of the trip which takes us to Temple Texas and the Turkey Roost Campground.

Tonight, we are going to try sleeping in a Pilot Travel Center parking lot. We found a spot in the back of the parking lot that we hope will be quiet. We are trying to camp at National parks or on Bureau of Land Management property as the rates are less expensive than state campgrounds. RV campgrounds are as expensive as hotels. We CAN afford to stay in hotels every night. I prefer to not spend the money for a place to sleep when we can sleep in the back of the car.

All the terrain today has been desert. Both of us are ready for some green! Green other than cactus. No blooming flowers along the freeway in New Mexico or Texas so far. We had lots of blooming desert plants in Arizona. About and hour before Odessa we started spying the oil pumps. The first Texas rest stop we hit today was just about 40 miles west of Odessa. Beautiful place. I could have slept there! Interesting that in Texas parking at the rest stops is parallel instead of angled parking. Lucky for us there was plenty of room.

At the same truck stop, we met a man driving from Chino, California to Dallas for a wedding. His son is in the wedding and decided to fly instead of riding with the family. I’m with the son.

Two things about today’s drive that remind me of living in Cairo, Egypt. The first was the colorful homes in Juarez to the south of El Paso. I mentioned it to Joe, and he said, they use the vibrant colors in Mexico as well – which is when we realized Juarez runs alongside of El Paso. The second thing was going through a checkpoint. We went through a border patrol checkpoint easily. They waved us through without checking our ID. We do look innocuous. My last checkpoints were when we traveled from Cairo to Fayoum. The checkpoint in Egypt we were accompanied by armed guards. Glad that didn’t happen in Texas!

If there is any lesson from today’s trip it is that the United States is huge. In the past 14 days we have driven 2632 miles with 5 of the days on the road racking up miles.

I am trying to appreciate everything we see along the way. Yesterday’s huge billboard with Donald Trump proclaiming, “They are really after you! They are just using me to get to you.” I am paraphrasing because we were hurtling down the freeway at 75 miles per hour (The speed limit for most of today was 80). Anyway, I am not sure who ‘they’ are referring to - maybe New York prosecutors? Maybe Georgia prosecutors? Way though to spread paranoia. Could it be that they are going after Trump because he broke laws? And if others break laws ‘they’ will go after them, too.