Blogs from El Paso, Texas, United States, North America

We arrived in El Paso on Monday 2 Feb to some of the most beautiful weather of the trip. First, I had to get a musical ear worm out of my head, old Marty Robbins song about "West Texas Town of El Paso". I'm pretty sure Mom listened to Marty Robbins on the old RCA record player when we lived on Lockbourne AFB. I know I've never listened to Marty Robbins. Anyway, I finally got rid of it when connecting to WIFI...someone named their SSID "Puff the Magic Dragon"...so you know how that turns out ;-( We decided on this stop to rest and catch up with RV related chores. Following a hydraulic leak in the jacks, the sensor would show jacks down and alarm, so to work around this we'd remove the fuse. I'm a ... read more

Got up early to get some photos before the crowd rolled in. Then did the tourist things. Saw a side show brought souvenirs, T shirts etc...Then visited Boot Hill and Got out of town on my Honda. The Sunset wasn't spectacular, but I could see it in the side mirror and with the lights, I thought it might make for an interesting shot. By the time I got set up it had gone. I got back to the car and the State Troopers pulled up beside me to see if I was ok. ( I did stop on the side of a freeway) Made Camp at a New Mexico Rest Stop. Up and on the road again. Not much to see for about 100miles. Altough the hills are starting to roll instead of being jiggered. Got ... read more

Geo: 31.7592, -106.487As much as DH enjoyed San Antonio, I really liked El Paso. I had always conjured up images of the border town of El Paso, Texas as a rough and tough gunfighter town which personified the old wild west days. The city's lawlessness in the late 1800's had earned it the moniker of “Six Shooter Capital” and the city's first and oldest street was the scene of the infamous Four Dead in Five Seconds Gunfight. And when we found out that a local pawn shop had the trigger finger of an infamous Mexican bandito on display (and for sale) we knew this could be fun visit. There's a natural link to a colourful piece of history in that Pancho Villa was a Mexican Revolutionary general, provisional governor of the state of Chihuahua, and was ... read more

From my retirement in 1998 until I began “The Great Adventure” in March 2010, I lived 2-1/2 hours from El Paso TX, whose literal translation means “The Passage,” and have been to the city many times to shop and to retrieve or to deposit passengers at the airport but have never actually SEEN the historic city. As an adolescent, El Paso’s namesake song by Marty Robbins offered a certain mystique to the city. Stories related by my relatives and my father’s friends who had been stationed at nearby Fort Bliss TX fueled my fascination. Having travelled through western Texas and southeastern New Mexico many times, I often wondered what factors caused such a vibrant, thriving city of almost ¾ million people (22nd largest in the U.S.) to develop HERE – amid such stark desolation. The short ... read more

Today was one of those days when nothing seemed to go as planned. We started out in Lordsburg, NM getting up bright and early so that we could go to breakfast before we hit the road. Little did we know that we had hit the time change so instead of it being 8:30 it was 9:30 after we were seated for breakfast which didn't bode well for an early start. Oh well. Then we had a choice of two ways to go to the Carlsbad Caverns. We decided to go through Las Cruces instead of El Paso because we hadn't been there before. Well we got to Alamagordo and the road that we needed to take over to Carlsbad had NUMEROUSsigns forbidding trucks or vehicles or 60 ft from traveling on this road. There was a ... read more