Day 4: Tucson
The drive to Tucson from Houston is long. As such, we were forced to divide up the journey into smaller stretches: Houston to San Antonio; San Antonio to El Paso (long), El Paso to Las Cruces, New Mexico; Las Cruces to Tucson, AZ.
To San Antonio we first had to leave Houston. Like I said before, Houston has a lot of traffic, and I think that’s the impression that I’ll be left with until I revisit again under different circumstances. San Antonio is about a 3 hour, uneventful drive. In fact, the entire trip across Texas is uneventful.
I didn’t know that the Alamo was in downtown San Antonio, so when I saw that we needed gas and that the Alamo was there, I pulled off into the city despite our tight schedule to make it to Tucson at a reasonable hour.
You’ll see a picture of the Alamo in the previous post. We didn’t really go in, we just saw the outside, took a couple pictures, had a stranger take our picture, and then we were on our way again. Very efficient.
Now San Antonio to El Paso is nothing but a straight road. Theres not much to say about it. It’s long and straight. There are bushes on the side of the road. Every car that’s driving down that road is on cruise control. You can tell when someone passes you painfully slowly that it’s almost awkward. In other circumstances, one or the other would slow down or speed up to minimize the the chances of making eye contact, but on such a long drive, both parties are too lazy and you just try to ignore each other.
I took the final shift into El Paso thinking that it was right on the border and that I would cross the border before changing out. Unfortunately, once past El Paso, the road curves north along the border, almost as if it doesn’t want you to leave Texas. At this I got fed up and swapped out into the passenger seat.
By then it was already dark. We still had to make it across the corner of New Mexico and to Tucson. We had been warned of dust storms that might make the night crossing difficult, but we didn’t encounter anything of the sort.
By the time we made it to Tucson, the time zone shift made it still before midnight, but we were beat.
Tomorrow, a short jaunt to San Diego and then swing up to LA.
Oh forgot to mention that we almost got a ticket going 85 in an 80 zone. The cop let us off with a warning.
