day 11 - big bend national park, tx to albuquerque, nm

We left Big Bend early this morning to get a head start on the long 6-hour drive to Albuquerque through El Paso. Our morning got off to a creepy start with this nasty surprise, which had apparently been hiding under our tent all night. It was five inches long.



On our way out of the park, we passed Border Patrol, there to make sure that no illegal immigrants had crossed via the Rio Grande.


We passed through the small towns that made up the road from Big Bend to El Paso rather uneventfully, seeing much of the same scenery we'd become accustomed to in the park.

El Paso was probably the biggest disappointment of our trip so far. We were excited by the prospect of a colorful, vibrant border down connected by a bridge to another colorful, vibrant border town with delicious food and fun shops to browse. Instead we got this crappy dead-end place that was hot, devoid of attractions, and completely boring.


We paid $0.35 apiece to cross the Santa Fe Street bridge into Juarez, Mexico.


We thought Mexico might be exciting. What we found across the border was...exactly the same: uninspired and shoddy town, but even worse, everything was in Spanish!




After about 25 minutes wandering the streets of Juarez (and getting a few stares because Asian tourists are probably pretty rare there), we decided to head back across to US soil. We paid $0.30 cents to cross back.

Then we hit the border patrol line. It took an hour - possibly more - of waiting in the heat in line with a bunch of Mexicans to get back into Texas.

Then we tried to look for a highly rated restaurant on Yelp. Google Maps drew a blank and led us into a sketchy alleyway.

With that last disappointment, we decided to hightail it out of El Paso and head off to Albuquerque. Our original destination was Santa Fe, but Albuquerque happened to be about an hour closer, so we figured we'd just check it out and spend the night.

Along the way, we passed a town with an odd name.


Albuquerque turned out to be a delightful city. It's quite lively, clean, and neat, and the sizeable student population has made it so that there are plenty of restaurants, convenience stores, and other places of interest open late at night. We went to Frontier for some late-night Tex-Mex.




Now, we're holed up in what is one of Albuquerque's best hotel deals: Sandia Peak Inn.

We're thinking about skipping Santa Fe altogether tomorrow; rumor has it that it's kind of artsy-fartsy and neither of us are that type. So we may hang out in "ABQ" for the morning, and then head straight to Mesa Verde National Park to camp for the night.