Day 15: Into Texas, Kerrville

Since there really wasn't much else to see in Roswell after we had been to the museum yesterday, we decided just to press on and head into Texas. On the way out of Roswell we had yet another challenge figuring out the time. It seemed that every different electronic sign had a different time posted on it. Some one hour behind, some one hour ahead, others just off by half an hour. It has just occurred to me that perhaps we were experiencing some kind of time-dialation aftereffect from being abducted by aliens. We were in Roswell after all. Or maybe not.

Out on the road, we crossed the border into Texas within an hour or two as we headed towards our eventual first goal in Texas, Austin. We decided that today would be a good day to just cover lots of ground, to give us more time in the one place later on. We passed through Ft. Stockton and continued for another couple of hours East on the I-10 before we decided to stop and have lunch. Alex found a rest area for us to stop at and have some lunch. Luckily, as we were both in need of a bathroom break, the rest area seemed to have a bathroom. It turned out to be not a toilet, but a replica of n old coach stop that used to be located there. We walked around the building, hoping that there was a toilet, but there wasn't. All we found were several stains of disappointment left by other travellers at the back of the building. How hard would it be to put a toilet in a building that looks like a toilet should be in it?

The landscape was really starting to change again. Lots of green trees populated these rolling hills. So far Texas is nothing like we imagined it to be. I guess we expected something more like what we were seeing in New Mexico, lots of desert and sand. We covered almost 300 Miles today, and as it got dark, we realised that we probably weren't going to make Austin without lots of night driving, which is something that would kind of defeat the purpose of driving. A quick search by Alex found a Walmart we could stay in a couple of towns ahead. We ducked around a few mountains, and a blinding strobe light on a truck (I don't think they have the same laws regarding lighting on vehicles – I've been almost blinded a couple of times at night), soon we arrived in a town called Kerrville.

In the dark this place looks just like lots of other places we've visited so far, and there is a little deja vu walking into Walmart, and having it look just the same as the last one we were in. I guess it's noo worse than staying in hotel rooms though, they all kind of look the same too. We wanted some ribs for dinner, but the BBQ place the GPS said we should be right near must have closed down, so we had some steak instead.