Day 8

Depart: Fort Stockton, TX at 8:15 am: Sunny, 34 degrees

We departed the small town of Fort Stockton today and continued our journey west. Our first stop of the day was in Van Horn, TX because we wanted to see "The Van Horn Car Museum". When we got to the location, all we saw was an empty lot (shown here). We saw some old cars in a building accross the street, and learned that the car museum burned down about a year ago. Update your literature Texas!!!

After leaving Van Horn, two things happened, we crossed into the Mountain Time Zone (and gained an hour!), and we also left the Hill Country of Texas and entered into the Big Bend Country of Texas, which was filled with big mountains like these.

More mountain scenery.

There were mountains, and there was desert, but it was cold. For a large stretch of our trip we could see Mexico, but we didn't enter it because Mexico is sketchy. We did see some border patrol vehicles and a checkpoint, but we didn't get searched.

Our last city we saw in Texas was El Paso. El Paso is right on the border of Mexico, and most of the billboards were in spanish. We could see El Paso's neighbor city Juarez as well, there were lots of houses on the hills that resembled a shanty town, and the traffic was very congested for 10 in the morning, so we decided not to stop.

After leaving Texas, we entered New Mexico "The Land of Enchantment", although I never felt very enchanted, so I think thats just some sort of marketing ploy.

New Mexico has lots of dangerous critters, but we didn't see any. New Mexico also had lots of scary "Beware of dust storms, use extreme caution, visibility zero!" signs, but we didn't get to see any duststorms :(. New Mexico took us to our highest altitude yet of 4,200 feet when we reached the continental divide.

In New Mexico, we stopped in the city of Las Cruces and got our first oil change (yes, 3000 miles already). At the Jiffy Lube they had free cookies and soda, people are much friendlier and trust-worthy here. Before we left New Mexico we visited the ghost town of Steins. Click here for some pictures of Steins.

We missed the "Welcome to Arizona" sign, because they have no welcome center, and the welcome sign is in the middle of the highway, we will get it when we enter Arizona again later. Our stop for tonight is in Willcox, Arizona. It's another small town similar to Fort Stockton, but a little larger.

Arrive: Willcox, AZ at 4:30pm: Sunny, 64 degrees