As far as I can divine, March on South Padre Island is an extended period of debauchery known as Spring Break. Wave after wave of college students descend onto the small spit of land along the Gulf Coast for each of their respective weeks off to experience everything that their parents earnestly told them not to do in the last eighteen years of their lives.
I have now resorted to using chapstick on my raw nose. Too many tissues have left my nose in unseasonable competition with Rudolf. Being sick on the road certainly is a mixed bag.
Tonight, for lack of a better spot and disinterest in spending camp fare, we settled down in a Pilot Truck stop parking lot. We wound down the evening with the dinner of champions: cup of noodles, while watching what appears to be a van camper and a homeless man chatting.
Big Bend National Park is 1,252 square miles of mountains, desert, and river in south east Texas. It sits in a niche along the Mexico border where the Rio Grand sweeps around half of the park's border. It is host to magnificent cliffs, breathtaking expanses, and vibrant wildlife.
Route 170 along the Rio Grande is a constantly compounding collection of cliffs, hoodoos, ravines, wildflowers, and ruins. We are headed to Big Bend National Park but via 67 to 170, setting us up for a winding road along the Rio Grande. It is yet another spot where we rejoice in our relative isolation but constantly bemoan our limited time. The route is about as close to the US-Mexico border as you can get without swimming in the Rio Grand. In our theme of traveling the border, you can't do much better than this.
The Chinati Foundation is a contemporary art museum. Its houses a collection of permanent installations across the rambling campus of a decommissioned air base. But it isn't a spot you just wander in to. No, It takes an appointment, a guide, and a lot of time.
We had a few hours to kill before our tour at the Chinati Foundation so we hit another notable art spot in town. Ballroom Marfa is a contemporary art space in the heart of town. Like all good things Marfa, it is a converted building. Before hosting films, music, and performing arts events and a gallery, the structure was a dance hall dating back to 1927.
Seven miles east of Marfa, surreal lights attributed to UFOs, will-o-the-wisps, or the reflections of car lights and camp fires have been sited along a portion of the desert often between 2 and 3 AM. So, people camp out at a conveniently located rest stop, hoping to have their own illuminating experience.
We have zig zagged across the country enough now to see familiar places. There goes the gas station with prices so inflated that we risked running out of gas rather than indulge the gouging owners. There is the parking lot where I taped up Dodgy I's window when it rolled down for the last time and never quite rolled back up. And up ahead is Prada Marfa. This stop is intentional because what we didn't know at the time we passed Prada Marfa the fist time is that it is only the tip of the minimalist artistic iceberg floating alone in the East Texas desert known as Marfa.
We arrived in El Paso a little after rush hour. The freeway congestion has not yet fully cleared. I watch a truck, then a van, then a compact car drive off the free way, down a gravel embankment, and onto a service road paralleling the freeway. A car already on the road honks as one of the traffic defectors cuts him off. This is what we've been trying to avoid.