Tucson (137) through Las Cruces (138) and Odessa (139) to Dallas (140 – under 150)

After a wonderful 3 weeks in Tucson, it was time to move on. If you ever have the chance to go there, do it, but choose winter in which to do so! There are so many places to visit and explore that 3 weeks simply wasn’t enough – we hope to get a chance to go back again one day.

As the Mexican border was so close, we chose to travel on the I10 as it’s a very busy dual-lane highway and reduced our concerns of being stopped by illegal immigrants trying to enter the USA. Our intended destination was Dallas, but the distance required us to stop overnight at least twice along the way, possibly more if driving conditions were poor.

As it turned out, the weather was very much on our side and driving was easy – easy but boring as there are miles and miles of nothing at all to see!

Las Cruces in the distance

We passed the border between Arizona into New Mexico at about lunch time, and around mid afternoon after 260 miles and about 5½ hours of driving, we saw a mountain range in the distance. At its base is Las Cruces, and as we neared it, it appeared to be a great looking little city with Adobe style buildings.

The campground and facilities in which we’d booked looked magnificent and the brochures we gathered showed a number of interesting looking places to explore. In fact, I’m still in trouble today for not spending a relaxing time in the campground’s lounge room. Instead of sitting back to unwind after the long drive, I decided we needed to clean out the toilets!

The connection to the underground sewer in Tucson was slightly elevated and as a result, our system didn’t flush out as well as I’d hoped (not a great subject I know, just hope you’re not about to eat or have just eaten). This meant the toilets in the Sierra were really “on the nose” and needed attention. The sewer outlets in this campground were flush with the ground and perfect for a great rinse out.

While I’m writing this blog (4 weeks after the event) I asked Grace if she remembered helping to clean out the toilet system instead of relaxing, and I’m left in no doubt whatsoever that she does...in detail! Well, I did say they LOOKED magnificent, I didn’t mention that they FELT magnificent!

I awoke the following morning to another glorious sunrise and couldn’t let the opportunity pass without a few photos while the others slept a little longer. Today’s drive to Odessa was to be longer than yesterdays, nearly 350 miles and expected to take 7½ + hours. We were also going as close to the Mexican border as it is possible without actually entering Mexico.

We crossed the New Mexico border into Texas early in the morning and drove into El Paso, about 40 miles south of Las Cruces and were very surprised by its size, much, much larger than Las Cruces. It felt like a major city on the Californian coast and the traffic at times was quite heavy, despite the many over and under-passes and wide, multi-lane roads.

Once we’d passed through the city, the Mexican border became very close, only a few hundred metres away and even closer a couple of times. Although there was no fence, a railway track was shown on our map to be located inside Mexico and the railway tracks were clearly visible from the car. We noted a significant increase in the number of Border Patrol vehicles and several helicopters traversing the length of the road and above the railway tracks.

If you click on the picture to enlarge it,
you will see the railway track as a
black line fron the centre right

Grace has always wanted to see Mexico and today was her opportunity! Not the way she’d desired, but the many shows we’d seen on television and through the cable television networks had raised huge concerns about our safety there. From a distance, we saw clouds of dust where Mexican farmers were ploughing very dry paddocks, and could imagine the geography in the northern parts of Mexico to be exactly the same as we’d been seeing in southern New Mexico and Texas. So, we pretended we were there!

The highway paralleled the border in a south easterly direction for about 70 miles, and then broke away to head almost due east for a further 80. It then forked as the I10 headed south east to San Antonio and we took the I20 heading north east towards Dallas. There was still a whole lot of nothing to see except plains giving way to rolling hills, sometimes quite steep, but those who designed and built the highways avoided most of those.

Our next “one-night-stand” was Odessa, in the mid west of Texas and not a lot to see. Odessa was originally founded as a water stop and cattle shipping point on the Texas and Pacific Railway. It became an incorporated city in 1927 (that means they have their own tax revenue by which they run the city’s police force, councils etc, rather than relying on the county – unincorporated means they rely on the county’s resources) after oil was discovered in Ector county on the Connell Ranch southwest of Odessa.

With the opening of the Penn Field in 1929, and the Cowden Field in 1930, oil became a major draw card for new residents. In 1925 the population was just 750; by 1929 it had risen to 5,000. Due to increased demand for oil during the Second World War, the city's population had expanded to 10,000.

Again, we didn’t un-hitch as we still had another 330+ miles to drive the following day, an expected journey of over 7 hours. We left around 8.30 am and if we thought the passing scenery for last two days driving was uninteresting, this topped those days. We didn’t even take a single photo because we already had plenty of photos showing flat plains with the road diverging and disappearing into the distance.

We arrived in Dallas late afternoon and had chosen a campground in Arlington, south of Dallas, not the fantastic Vineyards campground on the north side we originally stayed in at the beginning of our journey. That was due to the work we wanted done on both the Sierra and Chevy. But, more about that in the next blog.