Day 3- 11/14/12

I checked my field notes (which were really just real-time posts to facebook). We made it as far as Abilene, TX on Day 2. I drove until sun up and we stopped at a Walmart to get some supplies and toiletries. From there, Jenn drove about two and a half hours or so from Sweetwater through to past Pecos, TX. I resumed driving as I wanted to be in control in case we ran into some border shenanigans as we approached El Paso and Ciudad Juarez (on the Mexico side).

Here are the Day 3 photos and captions:

 I should have taken better notes. No clue which city this is. But at night, all cities in the Midwest look like this. They look like hope on the horizon. Hope for rest of a weary soul. Hope for fortune, or fuel, or whatever rest or respite one might be seeking on the road. Everything will be pitch black until you crest over one last hillside and see the sprawling glow of development. This was somewhere in the Fort Worth or Dallas area...reasonably sure.

 The shot is a bit out of focus, but I was trying to capture the hundreds of windmills in the windfarms as we approached Sweetwater, TX

 Jenn took over driving duties. My only regret is that I absolutely slept through Midland, Odessa, and I think there was like one other football-movie inspired town. Jenn said there wasn't much I missed, but I wanted to see it all the same. Not that we had anything to do. If nothing else, I wanted to do more James Vanderbeek quotes from Varsity Blues. She robbed me of that opportunity.

 Lots of trains from here on out.

 I don't know why I took this picture. I think it was just to show what the road looked like from my perspective. Yes, I could have framed the shots better to get the lift out of the shot, but I like the lift in the shot. I also like the rubber duck, Rufus.

 I was attentive enough to catch the time zone transition on camera.

 Mountainous terrain.

 Sierra Blanca. I wonder if there is a beer named after this as well.

 I guess not every shot warrants a caption. My goal here was to find a cheerleading T-shirt or perhaps Cheerleaders themselves so we could stunt. I had no such luck in either endeavor.

 One of the really cool things to see was this campus of predominately Latino, Chicano, Hispanic (I'm a bit ignorant as to when and in which circumstances the designations apply) students and professionals engaged in their various pursuits. A lot of the time, people of color on a college campus are in some sort of administrative or support role, few of them as students, and fewer still as academics. The demographics of the city hinted at such, but to see it play out on the college campus was really inspiring to see the tremendous opportunities being put to good effect here. I spent a lot of time just people-watching and listening in on the various conversations happening around us as we walked through the bookstore, some of the campus areas, and then sat down for lunch on campus.

 This was my favorite sign of the trip, I think. It almost had its own little island between two onramps. So I cut across both and parked the truck broadside in front of it.

 Then I set the camera on the toolbox or somewhere on the truck and got Jenn and I in the shot.

 She takes her shoes off. There would be times I'd hop out the truck and be heading hurriedly towards something for a photo and look back at my little lady trying to put her shoes on.

 I thought this place would be more of a brewery and less of a restaurant. It was ok, just not what I had expected. Their computers were down and one of the servers/bartenders had called out sick. Service was painfully slow, but the beer was at least pretty good. I ordered a sampler of four, 4-ounce beers to limit my consumption to essentially one beer so we could keep driving. Some lady made a comment about skipping serving us since we didn't know what we wanted (as she inferred from my sampler). I knew EXACTLY what I wanted; I just didn't want to get as tanked as you locals who are here getting FACED in a bar in the middle of a neighborhood in the middle of the day. So instead of drinking 4 full pints, I have the equivalent of one. I was a bit perturbed by that. She couldn't tell where we were seated, but I was definitely within earshot and was the only person who had ordered the sampler. But that's ok.

 My little lady posing with the draft list.

 So we left there and started driving through the New Mexico desert. I got one of those parka-like hoodies that Tom Kennedy used to wear while at this place. I now have the Tom Kennedy look. Tom is not one of the famous Kennedy's to my knowledge. He's more infamous than famous around GW.

 I really like this truck.

 Here are some really bad photos of me trying to get the Border Patrol vehicles in frame. We were in the US and still had to go through an anti-smuggling checkpoint. It was a bit weird.

 So this crossing was kind of funny. It was fairly late and clearly dark. Jenn had no interest in getting out of the car for this shot. The photo doesn't do it justice, but there was some intense desert fauna just beyond the frame. Very high, dry grasses, shrubs and brush. It was pretty dense comparative to other areas of the landscape. So I'm kinda negotiating this in the dark a bit for the shot. All of a sudden, Jenn is just like, "I can't tell what it is!", and she kinda yells it. I lost my sh*t 'cause now I'm like 'What "IT"?!" And she's not being descriptive at all about what or where this danger is. Is it moving? The blur is due to the extended time frame of the shutter exposure and me promptly launching into full spring back to the truck to clarify what "IT" was.

It turned out to be some white debris, and she just couldn't see what exactly it was. It caught a glare of light and that's all it took to set her and me into a frenzy of tire squealing away from what was probably a Styrofoam cup in the desert. Great. Shave 3 years off of my life.

 

Random rest stop photo.