Texas and More

 

  After Uncle Vern's birthday party on Sep. 17, we headed for Massachusetts where our three sons and four grandchildren live. We were booked to watch the two younger grandkids for a week and had 2,600 miles to cover in six days. 

  After saying goodbye to Vern and his daughter Kelly, we headed east past the Superstition Mountains and into the the canyons and hills of the Basin and Range. Arizona is a highly scenic place.  We crossed New Mexico, also scenic, and drove though the widely dispersed towns which could have been Anywhere, USA. 

  We hopped on US 10 which took us down to El Paso and the Rio Grande and The Wall. We could see Mexico from our dashboard. The houses atop the hills must have been the homes of the well-to-do. The wealthy always get the river views. Beneath the adjacent overpass was an endless car show with families picnicking between the cars. 

  Finding a motel for the night is always a game for us. Around two p.m. we know how much further we want to drive before quitting between six and seven. We aim for  a good sized town with lots of options. The game is to satisfy everyone in the car. One of us likes cheap while the other insists on clean. We've had luck lately with the Priceline site. Certain motel chains are no-go zones. A few brands are always good but sometimes they price themselves out of our range.

  Then there's the middle options. Sometimes a place is great. The next time a place with the same name tag can be a dump. Priceline has lots of recent reviews. If there's a report of even a single hair in the tub, we move on. Complaints of cranky staff or a balky waffle machine won't deter us as long as we see the word "clean" used frequently in the reviews. It's funny how a place with perfect rooms can have a bashed-in looking lobby. But as Conrad Hilton says, you don't sleep in the lobby.

  Speaking of breakfast, all of the many motels we've stayed in over the years have had women attendants in the breakfast nook except at the two Texas motels we stayed in. I wondered if the relatively cushy job of nook attendant was reserved in Texas for former chuck wagon cooks.

  It took over a day to cross the breadth of Texas. We had to stay on the interstate to get to our goal on time. No back roads travel this time. Texas produces almost half of the four billion barrels of oil the U.S. extracts per year. North Dakota is a very distant second. We crossed the state's parched mid-section. We didn’t so much see oil wells as we did trucks carrying equipment for drilling, refining, and handling oil. Odessa, Midland, Big Spring, Sweet Water, and Abilene came and went in the distance. We only saw their big box stores.

  During WWII my father traveled by train from Florida to California to meet his ship. He told us it felt like Texas was several days wide. It hasn’t gotten any smaller since his day,  though the means of transport are more commodious.

Sunrise over Sulphur Springs