El Paso, West Texas

Well, a week in El Paso passed so quickly but first things first. We left Fort Davis and had an overnight stop at Van Horn. Van Horn looks as though it may have been interesting but timing, as they say, is everything. The trip was not without its’ interesting points. The geology here is amazing and throw in the odd dust storm or two, a clover leaf in the desert and a long load and the miles just whittle away.

It was not great to get to our RV Park to find it is right under a freeway clover leaf of its’ own but as a kind of compensation we decided one night to dine out at another favourite eatery, Red Lobster. We followed this up a day or so later with a tour of El Paso. The big red ‘X’ you can see in one pic is in Mexico. We were intending to cross the border again but Trump was threatening to close the border without notice and so we decided against it and took a trip to the north to Camping World to get some RV supplies.

Passing a Mexican inspired housing estate (actually one of many) we visited San Elizario Historic area. It is another mission and fort from the 1800’s but what is interesting about here is that it has the only jail that William Bonney (AKA Billy the Kid) broke IN to. Yes, IN. He was breaking out his best friend and offsider and he did so by convincing the Sheriff he was bringing a criminal in for jailing and then he jumped the Officer. It was also the home of a force of Buffalo Soldiers. The last two pictures are of another of the 6 missions in this area.

Meanwhile back at the freeway……. We headed out for another excursion to the north. Two photos here are out of sequence but no worries. Take a real close look at the two pictures of a mountain range (not the bypass range) in pics 4 and 5. You cannot imagine the energy required to bend and fold the earth in such a violent manner. We have never seen anything like it. Our friends in Townsville will really relate to this except not on the same scale but El Paso sits at the foot of a mountain (range actually) in a way the ‘Ville does around Castle Hill. To get around El Paso you can go either side of the ‘hill’. Well originally we took the I10 which took us past the city but through heavy traffic. On the way back we diverted via the Loop 375 road which took us over the hugest, most amazing city bypass we have ever travelled. At the lookout (one of several) where Shane is pictured sitting on a low wall alone we are at an altitude of 5280 feet. Mt Kosciuszko is only 7310 feet. (Keep this figure in mind. Australia’s highest mountain is 7310 feet high. It will come up again next blog.)

On the way down the southern end of Loop 375 we stopped at the Border Patrol Museum which was something a little different for us. Again we learnt a lot about a new subject. It is fascinating the extremes that smugglers and refugees will go to in their attempts to cross the border. Check out the ‘boat’ made from two car bonnets welded together. The last two pics were random shots where in the second last Shane captured some soldiers from Fort Bliss doing some activities. Fort Bliss is massive. It hosts 30,000 personnel and cover, 4,400 sq kms in total. The last one turned out to be prophetic with its’ dust storm warning but more on that next blog.

In this 3^rd gallery we ventured into the state of New Mexico to Las Cruces, a lovely town with a very historic plaza at Mesilla surrounded by quaint gift shops and cafés. Mesillas goes back to the 1860’s and still has some buildings from that period. At Las Cruces we also inspected the farmers market which was fun.

On another day we drove out of town to a rock formation called Hueco Tanks (pronounced “h-waco-tanks”), an important repository of Pictographs and petroglyphs. It very much reminded us of Kata Juta just next to Uluru in Australia. This entailed some rock climbing over some beautiful formations. The sad part is the amount of graffiti on the ancient art by morons with very low intelligence.