So excited! So disappointed

Today would be our last day in Texas for some time.  We completed all those 880 miles from the Louisiana state line to the New Mexico state line.  That's 1,408 km for all you metric people.

We are seeing a little higher hills/mountains, but they're isolated for the most part, not part of a range.  This is a shot of one of those such hills/mountains.

We saw quite a bit of this today too.  The rain was falling...over there.

We didn't have a lot of rain.  It was sporadic and never really a downpour at all.

We drove by El Paso, Texas, which made me think of, and sing, that Marty Robbins song "Out in the west Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican girl...".  And then lo and behold, who do I see?

We thought Lee Trevino, the golfer, was from El Paso since there's a road named after him, but I checked...he was born in Dallas, Texas.

We saw these weird things on a bridge in El Paso.  Have no idea what they're all about.

And then we arrived in New Mexico!  The Land of Enchantment.

And just in case we missed the first sign.

We saw quite a few of these both in western Texas and now in New Mexico.  They look like cattle yards for cattle getting ready to ship out.  There were lots of cattle around.  Poor things.

And the first sign indicating our destination - Tucson!

Ok, this is the reason for the title of this blog.  As we approached the western edge of Texas, we know the Rio Grande flows along the border between Texas and Mexico.  We can see Mexico.  This is exciting.  We've never seen the Rio Grande.  We keep looking for it, but the land is flat until the ridge (which is in Mexico).  We know we're going to cross it after we get into New Mexico and start heading due west again.  Here is the bridge!

What????  I put more water through my body today than is in this river.  Talk about a disappointment.    No wonder we couldn't see it!  I suppose it gets wider as it heads nearer the mouth down at Brownsville.  Sigh :(

We did see a roadrunner - but we didn't see Wile E Coyote behind him.  I think it's the New Mexico state bird.

We were stopped by Border Control as we're running parallel to the Mexican border.  They just asked our citizenship and we carried on.  I don't know why they didn't check us back in Texas along the Rio Grande.  The Mexicans could have just run across the "river".

We arrived in Deming, New Mexico, and our RV park and are all set up.  They've apparently had a lot of rain here.  It's a relatively short drive to Tucson tomorrow.  Nice to be finally arriving at our final destination.

Oh, and we're also now on Mountain time - so 2 hours behind all of you on Eastern time and 1 hour ahead of you on Pacific time.  We crossed into this time zone about 135 miles from the western Texas state line.

Ain't Nuthin Out There

Or so it appears.  Pretty desolate country - dry and currently pretty cold - only 10C today.  I know, I know...it's all relative.

 OK, so I said the other day you could breeze along pretty good at 75 mph = 120 kph.  How about this instead?  80 mph = 128 kph

It was supposed to rain today.  It didn't happen, but we saw these awesome looking clouds.  The effect was wavy - kinda cool.

There are several of these "grasshoppers" (as my parents used to call them) dotted on the countryside.  As I said to Gerard, at least the land is good for something - oil.  Not much else, I must say.

We saw this sign in the office where we registered for our RV park tonight here at Fort Stockton.  I like it.

This is the first time this has happened to us...we were driving along and Gerard said, where's a gas station we could go to?  I looked at our "Next Exit" book (which is awesome, by the way) and said, well, there's nothing that's "large vehicle compatible" until milepost 261, which was about 100 miles further on.  Gerard said, we won't make it that far.  Yikes!!!  There was another gas station about 50-60 miles up the road though that wasn't indicated as being able to take large vehicles, but often you can get through them.  Keep in mind that while we're hauling the trailer, the kilometres tick down pretty much 2:1.

As it ticked down on the range indicator in the truck, we held our breath...and made it.  Fortunately the gas station was set up such that we could drive through it with no problem.  Phew!  We are so used to just looking at the book and picking something out of the many options available.  Not so, way out here in the middle of nowhere!  Lesson learned.

So we made it here and were all set up before 4 pm.  We'll hang out here for the night and then it's off to New Mexico tomorrow, by way of El Paso...with a full tank of gas.

Last day in San Antonio

We had an absolutely beautiful day again today in San Antonio.  There was fog hovering around until about 9 a.m. but it soon lifted to reveal another beautiful day.  High of 23C today, but it's the end of the nice warm weather for a bit.

We headed into the downtown on the bus again and the first thing we did was a little cruise on the river through the downtown.  It certainly is a beautiful, picturesque setting.  The cruise tour guide was humorous and made it all worthwhile.  It lasted about 40 minutes.

Here's Gerard on the boat.  You can tell it was packed with tourists.

These are called "knees" from the cyprus trees.                       And St. Anthony was watching over us.

When we were finished with the cruise, we stopped at San Fernando Cathedral (one of the oldest in the U.S.) and plaza, the original church of the settlers in San Antonio.  Davy Crockett is buried here, along with the others who fought in the Alamo.  It was a beautiful ornate altar.

We then headed off toward the Tower of the Americas which was built for the world's fair (Hemisfair) here in 1968.  At the tower, you can see all over San Antonio, as you might expect.  It's the 3rd tallest tower in the U.S., behind the Stratosphere in Las Vegas and the Willis Tower in Chicago.  Of course, you all know what the tallest tower in North America is.

The Alamo is in the centre of the picture below, among the greenery.  It's a low white building.  And the Riverwalk is all around that area, although you can't see it for the buildings all around.

The only other thing we really wanted to do while here was to go through La Villita, meaning little village.  It's the oldest settlement area in San Antonio.  The original settlers here were from the Canary Islands, Spain.  Today it's made up of cafes, art boutiques, and that sort of thing.

This is of the Arneson Theatre.  The seating is on one side of the river while the stage is on the other side.  It's part of La Villita too.

 

 
We went back to our RV and had lunch there with Tibby.  Gerard went up to the pool to soak up some rays while I read some Margaret Atwood, then we packed up all our outside stuff for our trek westward starting again tomorrow.

Early this evening, we headed back into town for dinner on the Riverwalk at "Bella on the River", a mediterranean restaurant.  Bella (our granddaughter), we didn't see you here!  It was very good.

The Riverwalk area at night.

A horse-drawn carriage all lit up.

Tomorrow we're on the move again, aiming for Fort Stockton, Texas.

Beautiful San Antonio

It's nice to spend a few days in one spot while on the road.  A nice break from driving.  We don't have to get up too early and we can plan to do things other than drive.

Today was such a day.  We could have driven into downtown San Antonio, but why bother?  There's a single bus to take right outside our RV park that goes to the downtown fairly directly...and back, of course.  So that's what we did.

The first thing we did was take a 1-hour hop-on-hop-off double-decker tour of downtown San Antonio.  That gave us the lay of the land, so to speak.  Here's Gerard sitting on the bus.

When we were finished with that, we visited the Alamo, a famous site of a battle between the Mexicans and Texans, where the Texans lost.  Today it's a memorial to those who died during the battle.  The buildings that were part of a Catholic mission are still here (no doubt repaired since), but built in 1718.  The Alamo battle occurred in 1836.  Here's Deb in front of the chapel.

It was time for lunch after that, so we decided to head down to the famous Riverwalk and find a restaurant there.  It's an absolutely beautiful walk.  It's built on the San Antonio River plus a loop off the river and it appears they're continuing to add to it.  There are tons of restaurants and shops and hotels that border it.  Gerard is sitting at our table with the river loop behind him.

A tour boat going by (which we'll probably do tomorrow).

It's just a very pretty walk with water features now and then.

These guys like it too.

A public works sign up around construction.  You can't read below the "San Antonio" in the lower part, but it says "Deep in the Heart".

The Torch of Friendship - built in Mexico and was a gift to the city as a memento to the strong ties between the 2 nations.

 Oh, and we had to try a Margarita and Pina Colada at the Mexican restaurant below.  We sat under the blue umbrella in the middle beside the river.

Tomorrow we're thinking of the tower and/or the river boat, and/or  La Villita.  We also have a reservation for dinner along the river.  But we'll probably make 2 trips in.  We do have Tibby, so we can't just leave him for hours on end.

Texas is rather big

We're only about a third of the way across Texas.  Of course, that's going across the widest part from the Louisiana border to El Paso.  But we're in San Antonio.  We'll be here for 3 nights while we explore some of the city.

We had to drive by the City of Houston first.  Houston is the 4th largest city in the United States, so you can imagine it was quite a lot of highways, spaghetti junctions, and traffic to get through it.  This is the downtown from a distance.

Most of this part of Texas is pretty flat.  They call it the South Texas Plains.  And we saw our first cacti along the side of the road.  Speaking of roads, you can breeze along pretty good, if you want to. We don't do this hauling the trailer, but you could.  That's 75 mph = 120 kmh.

We arrived in San Antonio and our RV park around 2:30 p.m. and a balmy 27C.  It was actually up as high as 29C, but it will go down to 8-9C tonight.  Having said that, it is not normally this warm.  Reality check will happen in the next few days.

Here we are all set up.  We're about 3 miles south of the downtown so tomorrow we'll head into that area and do some exploring.

Back to my heritage? Uh no.

The reason for the title is because we've arrived in Beaumont, Texas.  Beaumont was my mother's maiden name.  My grandfather came from England, but I suppose the name is from the Norman invasion.  I haven't worked things back that far yet!  And I don't think my grandfather's family was ever in Texas.

In any case, we left New Orleans this morning, travelling along I-10.  Almost the whole highway through Louisiana is a bridge, or so it seems.  There is nothing but water and swamp.  I sure wouldn't want to run off the road.

Bridge

 Swamp

This bridge is a little more elaborate because it goes over the Mississippi River.  For the first time travelling on the road, we are west of the Mississippi.  A milestone.

Bridge

 

River

We arrived in Texas around 3 p.m. this afternoon and stopped at the Visitors Center (sp. - that's how they do it here - sigh).

I wasn't thrilled with this sign.  Yikes!  We're definitely keeping our RV closed up while here.

 Beaumont is a one-night stop on our way to San Antonio where we'll spend 3 nights.

What's really ironic here is I took this picture to show "Beaumont" in the sign (because of what I said above).  When we stopped at the travel center (sp.) we picked up a guide called "State Travel Guide - Texas".  On the index page is EXACTLY the same sign.  By the way, we are going as far as El Paso, and then some.  It's pretty much on the western boundary with New Mexico.  That's a llllloooonnnnggggg way.