All over the place...

...is where this post is going. Sorry, I'm getting carried away with this title thing. This is a bit long because I had no Net access last night.

Texas in One Bite

I confessed to Audrey and Mack at their dining table last night in Houston that I was having a hard time living up to the footloose premise of this trip. 660 miles and four visits the first day. No side trips the second day, and the planned visits in Atlanta and New Orleans both fell through for reasons beyond my control. No sightseeing en route from Metairie to Houston. So what did I do today? Something like 730 miles from Houston to El Paso, that's what.

Some context: Texas is huge! We all know that, of course, but it really hits home when you cross the state line near Beaumont and the first milepost you see on I-10 is 860-something. So I promised Audrey and Mack and myself that I'd quit at a reasonable time, like 6 p.m., and finish Texas tomorrow.

Well, it turned out that the speed limit is 80 mph all the way from San Antonio to the El Paso county line. Penny the Prius loves to go 80. She did it often for Rachel but I worry about speeding tickets on I-95. No such worries on I-10 and I cranked 'er up. Gas mileage dropped from about 42 (not the usual 48-50 due to the constant headwinds from the West, I think) to 36 per gallon, but hey, we're being Type A here. Then I remembered that the last two counties in West Texas are on Mountain Time. So I rolled into El Paso at 5:30 just as a cold rain was starting. Just short of 11 hours' driving but only 10 by the clock.

The drive was actually a thrill. After I got out of the green Houston area the hills were covered with brown grass and dotted, as the first two photos show, with scrubby stuff that I think is chaparral.

Farther west I went through mountains that didn't seem particularly large but that were as wonderfully knobby and rugged-looking as Spain's Guadarrama: the Davis Mountains (shown in the third photo), the Sierra Blanca, and a range on my left nearer El Paso that apparently is in Mexico and not identified on my Texas map.

However, the idea of another 800 miles on I-10 was really starting to bug me, and I realized that one of my big goals, to see the Grand Canyon, wouldn't fit in well with my return trip from San Jose to DC via Scottsbluff, Nebraska, so after dinner tonight I got on Mapquest and, just as a mental exercise, you know, checked the idea of a slight detour to northern Arizona between here and L.A. One thing led to another and now I've booked two nights at a Grand Canyon hotel. Tomorrow's drive is 600 miles and 9 1/2 hours. Thursday it's 500 miles and 7 1/2 hours, and in between who knows what adventures I'll have?

And I'll still be on the schedule I sketched out in my first post: in L.A on Feb. 25 and in Boulder Creek a couple of days later.

Weather

Just a brief note here: I'm running away from DC's Snowmageddon 2010 as you know. New Orleans was mostly in the 50s during the day. Houston yesterday evening was in the 70s and muggy, and I was happy to wake up this morning to a crisp, dry, overcast morning in the high 40s.

Today as I drove through San Antonio I heard a forecast of heavy precipitation tomorrow that might include an inch or two of snow. That's probably the rain that's falling here, and the National Weather Service predicts heavy snow for El Paso in the morning. Lovely.

Right now it's 44 here, and at the Grand Canyon it's 18 degrees! Those winter clothes from last Tuesday in DC will come in handy after all.

Odds 'n' ends

Some sights along the way that didn't fit into earlier posts:

• A "wide load" warning on a truck I passed west of Atlanta. The load was tires lying flat on the truck bed, each one larger in diameter than the traffic lane (what's that, 12 feet?)
• A KIA car assembly plant in West Point, GA, right on the Alabama line and right next to the Interstate with its own exit ramp.

There were more than these but I'm a bit foggy - if I think of them when I'm free to write, not driving, I'll post them on another day.