Today marks our 200th day on the road since we left Las Vegas. Technically we have been in the Airstream for much longer than that but the daily posts did not start for this trip until we departed from our 5-night hotel stay in sin city. We are getting very close to home and by the end of today, we will be even closer.
During one of our first visits to Tucson several years ago, we were introduced to the great Hotel Congress. Our friend Carrie use to live in Tucson and she acted as a tour guide and introduced us to lots of neat places in town.
As some of you might know, we have been back in California for some time now and have gone on many other adventures within the state since then. However, we cannot start sharing about those experiences until we are done with these last couple of weeks of our trip around the country. This is my best attempt at wrapping these last couple of weeks up so we can move on closer to the present. Let me rewind back a couple of months: Today, we are in Tucson.
We intentionally spent the night just short of Tucson last night in the town of Benson so we can go see one of the best preserved natural caves in the world. We found a Wal-Mart in Benson that had a no RV overnight sign but the manager had no problems with us being there. It is becoming more common to have cities and counties ban RV overnight parking in Wal-Marts.
As we drove west last night out of Las Cruces, we contemplated making the long drive all the way into Arizona and settle somewhere in Tucson. That would have been a really long trek and we would be missing a stretch of I-10 that we have not explored much in the past. We decided to stop at the town of Deming, New Mexico for dinner and stay the night at the Wal-Mart.
We finally made our way across Texas last night and landed in a Wal-Mart in Las Cruces, New Mexico. We have not been back here since near the beginning of our trip in 2010.
Our third day at El Cosmico is our last as we packed up our site and prepared to head back out on the road. We have a handful of places we still want to check out in town but we will do that on our way out.
Marfa is quite an amazing place to be this time of year. Something is different about the high desert in West Texas. We are only sitting at 4,600 ft in elevation but the lightness of the air and the special hue of blue in the sky makes you feel like you are much closer to outer space.
Our ordeal with the Texas Highway Patrol last night left me pretty riled and unable to sleep well for the rest of the night. If you don’t know what I am referring to, go read the end of this post and you will know what happened.
Last night we spent our first night at a Texas rest stop. Most, if not all, of the roadside rest stops in Texas allow at 24-hour stay. It stems back to the depression era when people were moving west to look for work and needed a place to camp for the night.
After our excursion in Austin yesterday, we actually found a Wal-Mart near the city that allowed overnight parking. At first glance, you wouldn’t think they would allow it because it is a smaller store. After we asked the manager inside, they gave us permission as long as we park in a designated area which we happily obliged.
Last night after we left Houston, we started to make our way towards Austin, Texas. At the town of Bastrop, 35 miles east of Austin, we passed the midway point of Ventura, CA and Key West Florida. We are now officially closer to where we started back in July 2012 than Hemingway’s polydactyl cats.
