Dean &
Ginny's excellent adventures, a series of
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Trek to retrieve our new RV and back -- 11/05
Part 6-From Texas to Florida: We stopped at Carlsbad Caverns in southeastern New Mexico. Even though it was only 3pm, no more tours were scheduled for the day, and it was too late in the season to watch the thousands of bats fly from the natural opening. We'll stop on another trip.
We continued south into Texas and spent the night in the Guadalupe Mts. The next morning we continued south, crossed I-10, and drove along the less-traveled Rt. 90. This part of Texas doesn't support many people, ranches, towns, or much else--pretty sparse. We drove through Marfa, which is famous for mysterious lights and a viewing area was provided in case you wanted to wait for the lights. They were first noticed by a cowboy in the 1800s and are still unexplained. Maybe Marfa should hook up with Roswell...
As
Rt. 90 headed in a more easterly direction we passed through Langtry
where Judge Roy Bean dispensed his harsh justice west of the Pecos
River. 
We
stopped at the museum with its surprisingly wonderful cactus garden with
a full- size model of a wind-run pump that ranchers in this area used
to pump
water from wells.
Inside the saloon, the story of Judge Bean's fascination with Lilly Langtry and his rules of behavior for patrons are shown. More details with old photos, letters, documents, and other paraphernalia in the museum building tell the rest of the story.
There's not much else in town, so we headed east. Rt. 90 goes through Del Rio, a border town; there were immigration officers stopping every vehicle in and out of town. They let us pass through.
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East of Del Rio and the Rio Grande, the towns seemed more prosperous and the traffic picked up. We headed to San Antonio where we enjoyed its famous River Walk and had dinner at Rita's. Dean recalled another time when he ate dinner on one of the boats that travel around the canals. |
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We stopped by the outdoor theater on the River Walk, where the audience is on one side of the canal and the stage is on the other. A lovely, arched pedestrian bridge is to the left of the stage. We imagined that the productions here would be interesting, if nothing else, simply because of the venue. The dinner boats and the water taxis would pass in-between the stage and the audience. "To be or not to be... " |
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The Alamo is in San Antonio, of course, but surrounded by the city, it was not the site for the making of the various Alamo films. Outside of town, we saw a place called Alamo Village with a reconstruction of the fort. We didn't stop.
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Onward across Texas. Damn, this is a big state and both of us were born here. Just think-- if we decided to move here, we could call ourselves natives even though we don't feel very much like Texans. We hurried through Louisiana and Mississippi. The devastation from the hurricanes is evident everywhere with flattened buildings, stores with no front walls, and for those structures left standing, blue-tarped roofs dominated the landscape. |
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<< This Mississippi welcome area sported vinyl billboard covers instead of a blue tarp. We didn't many other take pictures here. |
Welcome to Florida! Pensacola is home to the Navy's Blue Angels, so this welcome center provides the appropriate greeting.
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We'd heard from Gary, Dean's brother-in-law, that the Air and Space museum in Pensacola was worth seeing. We politely listened to him because we thought the Smithsonian's version would certainly be better than something out here in the sticks! We were wrong and Gary was right. It's a wonderful display of period planes and more... They're so close and some are set up so that you (or your kids) can climb right into the cockpits. We'll be back. |
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