From New Orleans we headed across the bottom of Texas from Houston, San Antonio to El Paso via the Hill Country where we visited President LBJs ranch which is now a state/national park which also houses the small farm house where he was born. He was a popular president because of the large amount of policies he introduced during his term in office. Some of his policies included civil rights, gun control (cough – cough), wilderness preservation and social security but he was not popular because of his escalation of the Vietnam War.
The highway we travelled was flat and the landscape reminded us a bit of the back of Bourke however the speed limit was 80 mph (130 km). We did a bit of a snap shot of the truck traffic for a mile and worked out there was approximately 6 trucks per mile (one way) which over the 400 miles we travelled equates to over 2400 trucks, we googled it and found that there is over 44 000 trucks on the road at any given time, over the same distance we saw 1 freight train.
We didn’t spend a lot of time in Houston but it has a very productive Arts District and there is a lot of graffiti art throughout the town.
San Antonio was another quick trip and Digby was a little disappointed in the Alamo as he didn’t realise that it was in the middle of the town surrounded by high rise buildings.
On arrival into El Paso we drove along the “wall” it is surprising that this 200 metres wide strip separates two cities, El Paso which is approximately 700 000 population and then Ciudad Juarez Mexico with a population of approximately 1.5 million. We have a better understanding of the southern states after learning more about the Spanish history and Mexican war.
From El Paso we headed north to Tucson via White Sands National Memorial which was one of the spots Digby visited when I was back in Australia but he wanted to take me there.
We couldn’t drive past the town of Tombstone where we spent the afternoon, the town is a popular tourist spot with the famous gunfight played out in the O.K. Corral.
Onto Tucson for a couple of days, we all know that there are two things in Tucson, Arizona and Digby is definitely a STEER, LOL. You can’t visit Arizona and not get a Saguaro cactus picture.
From Tucson we are heading north back into the cold weather but Digby wants to take me back to the National Parks that I missed out on.
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