Driving to Las Cruces, New Mexico from Austin is really just a fancy way of saying spending 6 hours on the same interstate in the same state, getting close to Mexico and then arriving. After getting through Texas hill country, the landscape got very flat and we could literally see the road go straight for miles. The speed limit jumps up to 80 and even though we were going under the speed limit, we only got passed by 3 cars over the course of 3 hours of driving. The general idea I’m trying to get across here is that space in West Texas is certainly NOT at a premium.
When we got to El Paso, the urge to jump over the border was pretty big, despite the fact that if we did that, we would jump right back. Unfortunately, one of our travel partners doesn’t have his passport yet, so that wouldn’t have happened. We did however take the time to drive through downtown El Paso and at least see the several sets of fences that mark the border. We also saw UTEP’s football stadium (the Sun Bowl) which is set in a few mountains and must look really cool from inside.
One thing that really floored me, was how easily you could tell the difference between El Paso and Juarez, Mexico. I would not think of El Paso as a huge/wealthy city by any stretch of the imagination, but next to Juarez, it might as well have been Los Angeles. Juarez was mostly just shacks and sheds while El Paso’s downtown looked down on it. I was left wondering things like, “does this town have running water?”, “how many people are just waiting to jump the border into the US either legally or illegally?” It really put into perspective what a less than spectacular Texas city was to the rest of the world.
