West Texas

A lady in Fredericksburg told Nancy that Alpine, Texas is a real pretty college town, and the roads to and from it are scenic.  So we decided to head there on our way west.

Along the way we pulled into a rest stop, and I took Tammy Faye and Sophia out to do their business.  They wandered out into the underbrush, generally a better business environment than concrete.  Suddenly they stopped moving, and I couldn't get them to even walk back to the motorhome.  They had stepped into a sticker patch, and their coats were full of nasty stickers.  When I tried to pull them off, it hurt me as well, for each little kernel was covered with sharp needlepoints.  There were stickers in our dogs' pawpads, which was the reason they were unable to walk.  I had to carry the two of them, one under each arm, back to the motorhome.

Nancy and I spent almost an hour removing the stickers from the dogs' coats and paws, combing, pulling, and cutting them out.  It was awful, but we got them all.

We stopped for the night at a campground near Ozona, Texas.  The campground manager, who stank of alcohol, told Nancy that the area was full of stickers, and that our dogs should not, under any circumstances, be allowed off the gravel.  That evening, when they had to do their toilet duties, we carried them to the gravel driveway beside our site.  But after only a few steps, they became immobilized again, and we had to extract more stickers from their pawpads.  The whole area was infested.

The only solution was for Nancy and me to each carry a dog in our arms about a hundred yards to a concrete area that was nowhere close to any dirt or underbrush, and thus, we hoped, safe.  There, after much coaxing, our dogs were able to perform, and remained sticker-free.  We repeated that process, with good results, the next morning, before we left.

That part of Texas is an absolute hellhole for long-haired dogs and the men and women who love them.

We drove into Alpine, Texas that afternoon.  It was a one-horse town, and the horse was lame.  Alpine did indeed have a college, but that's about all.  Nancy had been misled.  We had planned to stay there for several days, but soon realized that it wasn't a three-day town.  After one night at a campground there, we drove to El Paso.  The landscape along the way was stark, almost treeless, with cactus and sagebrush and dormant vegetation.  Ever so often we'd see a house out in the middle of nowhere and wonder what could lead a person to settle there.

El Paso is right on the Mexican border, across from Juarez, which has mostly been taken over by the drug cartel.  Entering the city, driving on a freeway, we saw a fence just over to our left and suddenly realized that this was the border fence erected by the US to keep out illegal immigrants.  It didn't look tall enough to be of much use, but later we saw that there was a deep concrete ditch on the other side. 

Our campground for the next two days was a mobile home park in the barrio with some campsites for RV's.  There was a wall around the place, with barbed wire on the fences, and a security guard at night.  Very confidence-inspiring.  Once, when Nancy took our dogs out for a toilet run, a flock of squawking guinea hens came charging at them, and they had to retreat back to the motorhome, venturing out again only after the band of birds had departed.

We drove into the city and saw a large number of people walking across a bridge from Mexico into the US, and most of them were shopping at stores on the US side.  At a tourist information center a few blocks away, we were told that it's easy for Mexicans to get shopping passes, and they like to come over and buy our goods, which is great for the local economy.  The lady said that there are checkpoints on all the roads out of El Paso, and there's good recordkeeping, so it's not easy to leave the area, thus few illegal aliens come across that way.  I remain skeptical.

We asked about local sports bars so I could watch the 49er game.  Our information lady told us that there is a 49er support group in El Paso, that they meet at a bar every week to watch the game, and that this week they would be at Smoky's.  We went to Smoky's on Sunday afternoon and indeed there were a number of 49er fans, some of them wearing the jerseys of Michael Crabtree, Vernon Davis, Patrick Willis, and others.  Most of them were Hispanic, and one was a border guard who told us about his work.  Unfortunately, San Francisco lost that football game, but it was fun sharing the experience with my El Paso brethren.

As we were preparing to leave our barrio campground, Nancy had a conversation with the lady manager and learned that during the construction of the border fence, there was gunfire from the Mexican side, and some of the El Paso buildings still bear the scars.  And that many of the border shops and businesses in Mexico had shut down, because they either paid protection money to the cartel or were forced out.   And that there were eight murders in Juarez this past weekend.  Sounds to me as lawless and dangerous as Somalia.