Texas

We passed through the devastated Louisiana town of Lake Charles and into Texas. I have no memory of this however as by this point I had already passed out in the car. Nathalie had suggested we could have Texas back and that the state was a bit shit. To be honest we had only decided to go there because we needed a route to get from east to west, but the state would constantly surpass our expectations in so many ways. Apparently I missed the Texas State sign saying 'Proud home of President George W Bush'. I expect we will have a similar sign up in Illinois next year :-) We drove out to the Lyndon B Johnson space centre and took the tour around the facilities. It was really interesting, especially for someone who knows nothing about science. the man taking the tour also pronounce the word 'moon' like he was howling at it, which made for an amusing tour. I stupidly set off the metal detector by walking through it with a can of coke in my hands. Tiredness was kicking in. Lots of stuff was still charged for inside which was a bit annoying after paying the entrance fee, but we got to see the original Houston mission control and a large selection of current and past space shuttles and vehicles. On the way in we had accidentally driven into actual moder day mission control and were promptly turned back as unsurprisingly we didnt' have security clearance. Following this trip we headed out to the San Jacinto monument which is a tower higher than the Washington Monument with a star on top symbolising the historic victory that gave Texas its independence. It was interesting seeing Texas as the only State that had once been a country and it helps to explain their proud State attitude. They are still the only State allowed to fly its State flag alongside the Stars and Stripes. We arrived at the Houston hostel which had a curfew (annoying but we needed sleep anyway). We headed out to the Hard Rock Cafe for dinner and watched the film Traitor. Houston is a big city, but it has exceptional trams for public transport and most parking in the centre of town was free of charge. Texas would prove to me the most driver friendly place we came to, with 12 lane wide freeways, slip roads that follow the main road for its entire length and speed limits of 80 mph. Who says the US has low speed limits. The hostel itself was full of weirdos as the Lonely Planet had warned us. One girl was shopping for birthday presents for herself on line and had teeth missing. Ollie asked her what she did and she replied "I knit cushions". Everyone who worked there was an oddity with limited conversational skills so we decided to call it a night and found our room full of jobless rockers who had been travelling across the States in search of work.





In the morning we headed to Breakfast Klub and were again enjoying the parking freedom. Until you have paid US parking meters and car parks you can't understand how liberating this was. They do the best breakfasts in town and the Obama supporting ladies at the counter kept talking to us because they loved our accents. We pushed on towards San Antonio and our host Rebecca. The radio station 101.5 FM played Cypress Hill and the Smashing Pumpkins. Very cool radio station. We arrived in San Antonio and headed to the library and then on to the Riverwalk. The guidebook said this was very beautiful and we anticipated a river with some pretty bars. Instead we got a jaw droppingly beautiful horseshoe shaped walkway with portcullis' for water control, water tours and very picturesque foliage and buildings. It looked incredibly European and even had a stone theatre on the river bend. We went to a really good Mexican restaurant and then headed out to Rebecca's neighbourhood, getting lost along the way. We stayed in for the night and watched Daily Show clips and the film Office Space. Rebecca brought out a language set called the Rosetta Stone that teaches you with pictures. So we decided to play with some obscure ones. Laki-Laki is Indonesian for boy and Ngeki is Swahili for aeroplane. We have now learnt plane in many odd languages and it was funny fucking about with the set. At least we should be able to fly now wherever we are in the World.





The next morning we headed out to a Texas style barbecue Rebecca had recommended and it was awesome. They need to adapt these for the UK as we are severely lacking in quality outdoor barbecue restaurants. We headed off around the Alamo, which is a pretty little church in the centre of town. It turns out that the first shots at the Alamo were fired by a South Carolinian. The first shots of Gettysburg were also fired by a South Carolinian as well as the first cannon fire of the Civil War. We concluded that people from South Carolina must be warmongers and wondered how many other fights they were responsible for starting. After this we headed for the Tower of the Americas which is the second tallest tower in the States. They showed us a film about Texas and the State looked awesome. We were going to miss Dallas, Big Bend National Park, the swamps and the panhandle which looked like a shame. Up the tower you get a good view of how pretty San Antonio is as a city. We took a riverwalk cruise which was a good tour and then headed to the English bar Maddogs to watch the England v Croatia game. Now they didn't have it on and the only football they could find was Slovenia v Slovakia. Quite who in Texas really wanted to watch that game I don't know. They had a bona fide Lolita on the door as the staff were all forced to wear tartan mini skirts (don't remember too many English bars with that dresscode but they should adopt it). We promised to buy some ice cream off her if she got us the football. We got the wrong football, but still bought some ice cream. The barmaid Dawn was in a tartan mini skirt and leopard print bar with seemingly a tattoo of Texas on her arse (it turned out to be something else). We had a lot of cool banter and she gave me all my drinks for free while we joked about parachuting her jeep into the Grand Canyon. Friendliness goes a long way in the South. She told us to head to a bar Duos later that evening (It turned out thats where she was to be working but we didn't know that at the time). All the staff in the place were given quotas on side products they had to sell to clientele. It was odd but they ahd to accept these and Lolita would not tell us how many ice creams she had to sell. Rebecca sent us a text about dinner and we headed back to her place. We met her fellow teacher and the four of us had a good Mexican dinner before heading to Duos. The place was dead and Dawn wasn't working yet, so we headed onto an Irish bar called Kennedys. We had a cool chat here. They do stack the crates of beer along the wall inside the bar though. If this was Ireland or England, those crates would have been out the window and down the road before too long. They mentioned a honky tonk line dancing place out in the sticks so we decided to head out to there. It was called the Midnight Rodeo. Rebecca informed us that the tall black guy on the floor was a regular and the best dancer in the place. She herself used to be a regular in her college days on the floor. The place is like a massive warehouse with a dancefloor in the shape of the Circus Maximus orbiting some bars in the centre. People dance around the oval doing two step shuffles to country music and then all of a sudden the music stops, they begin to play hip hop and everyone is line dancing to Jay Z. Very surreal. Its like an hour of country followed by a half hour of hip hop. Never would have imagined those two together. I tried my hand at the line dancing and just about handled it on the basic stuff. It was a really cool night and we stayed up chatting about Sweden/Scotland and life in general till everyone fell asleep on the couches. By this point in the trip we had given up on American road signs making any sense. They were always placed on the junction so you drive past it before you turn off. Then they have loads of unnecessary signs because everyone is prone to sue each other, so protection is needed. Finally the street signs are ridiculous. You can be driving down a 6 lane wide road and the road name will be up above head light height on one side of the road on a tiny sign. Its impossible to navigate anywhere and they need to put the road signs in the middle of the junction.





The next morning we decided to head to Austin via the Texas Hill Country where Lyndon B Johnson grew up. We decided to opt for some classical music stations for this secnic drive. There are some lovely towns out that way with classic western highstreets and wooden slat housing. We stopped off in Fredericksburg for lunch and hung there for a bit. Ollie informs me that it looks like Baldock Town, but I find that hard to believe. We arrived in Austin and checked into a hostel out in the middle of nowhere in the suburbs. After treking into town we watched the bats fly out for sunset under the bridge and that was quite spectacular. Austin looked like a funky city and it has one of the best bar and music scenes I have ever seen. Its 800,000 people but has a seen better than any other US city and on a par with London. We went to a really posh cocktail bar, then to a jazz club (the drummer there played with a slack jaw that made him look like he was mashed on drugs) and finally to a rock bar with a rooftop bar. The rooftop bar had great views over the city and the clientele was seriously upmarket and classy. I was beginning to love Texas. We saw an immense band called Mothers Anthem downstairs and got chatting with their manager. Picked up free cds and t-shirts because we were friendly. Others had to pay. The south of the States is immense for friendliness and its almost like a currency down there. We had a good night of drinking and then headed back to the hostel to catch up on some sleep.





The next morning we went up to the Texas Capitol and wandered around. We found a funny photo from when George W Bush was the governor of the State hanging in the building. We then headed for the museum of Texas History which was a really interesting museum, complete with a special exhibit on the tv show Dallas. We got to watch exerpts from the most famous episodes and had a long chat with a Texan guy who insisted they were the friendliest Americans, while we were describing our experiences in the South. This is where we started developing theories for why Southern Europe was friendlier than the North and the South of the States was friendlier than the North. Was it the heat, was it religion or were Republicans States just nicer than Democratic ones. We found a Death Metal Pizza place on 6th street and then decided to head to a bar called Emo's to watch Tokyo Police Club. We would narrowly miss seeing Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip as they were playing the tuesday afterwards. Anyone who was underage at the gig was marked with a black cross so they couldn't buy drink and three girls were promptly thrown out for disobeying this rule. Tokyo Police Club proved to be bland (and considering they were the only 'known' band we saw, they were much worse than the unknowns), but the two support bands were awesome. They were called The Boxing Lesson and Whigs. Austin has over 80 gig venues each night and hosts two industry music festivals. SWSX is 9 days long in March time and Austin City Limits is a three day festival. Suzanne in Nashville had told us that it was on mid september so we were hopeful of catching it but this year they moved it. Still this city is awesome and was easily in my top five. The showers in the hostel were like prison showers however and I'd just bought a new 75p towel from Wall Mart. As it was red it left marks all over my body, but I hadn't realised this and figured I was coming down with some sort of hideous skin disease that had made my skin bleed all over.



In the morning we went in pursuit of a hairdressers for Ollie and played some more mini golf on a course designed around Peter Pan. Following this we headed to the quintessential American hooters. It was just a burger joint and decent for what it was. In the evening we decided to chill and go to see 'Burn After Reading' because we had a monstrous drive the next morning, but the arthouse cinema was sold out and so we grabbed some cans of Dos Equis and headed back to the hostel. One of the guys in the hostel cooked pasta for everyone and we played some games of chess while some other people had a guitar jamming session in the corner. Everyone left the hostel and we got chatting with a German guy and his girlfriend from San Francisco who were now living down in Monterrey. He said he missed European company and although he had to go and meet his sister he joined us for some beers down on the jetty. It looked like I had found myself a place to stay down there when I went that way as well. We then got chatting with some randoms about a 'War on Terror' computer game, but all that actually happened was I ended up watching someone play risk online. There were some annoying English girls from Leeds in the hostel and a couple from Los Angeles (who informed me it wasn't as shit as I remembered it). There also came a late knock on the door and I let in some random software programmer from Wisconsin who was in town for a big electronics conference. Ollie informed me after looking at his stuff that it was crap and he had no chance of getting a job. As he works for IBM I trust him. There was also some random cat hippy who refused to talk to us. Once we finally escaped this motley crue I was awoken in the middle of the night by some dickhead who switched the light on and proceeded to swing his keys around like a prison warden. He stopped at the end of my bed and I narrowly resisted the urge to kick his fucking nose off.

We were up early and off on our way towards El Paso. It was a long 600 mile or so drive and we passed virtually nothing on our travels through the brushlands. Ollie did successfully manage to get pulled over by the police again for doing 87 in an 80, but more importantly for driving down the middle of two lanes on the motorway. He tried to argue with the officer, but we ended up with another 150 dollar fine, of which I paid $50 this time. We stopped off in pizza hut in Senora Texas which was in the middle of nowhere. Then I slept again as we entered a vast expanse of nothingness. Texas is bigger than Western Europe and is about 850 miles east to west. For a few hours we only came across a few scattered shack towns and both of us were starting to suffer from tremendous levels of tiredness. We eventually headed into Roswell and it was unsurprisingly a shitty little gimic town that proved a waste of time. The weird UFO museum was luckily shut by then and we didn't have to suffer it. Every shop in the entire town was built around UFOs and aliens, with weird models everywhere and little alien headed lightbulbs for the streetlamps. You would figure they could have used some of the resultant interest to diversify and become a proper city like San Antonio did with the Alamo, but they didn't even come close. Even the McDonalds we ate was stale. We limped down to Carlsbad and decided to spent the night in a motel around there.

In the morning we awoke to the death knell of capitalism. Merrill Lynch has been bought out by Bank of America and Lehman Brothers was going to the wall and had filed for bankruptcy. We also managed to catch a little bit of the hugely entertaining Obama debate with Bill O'Reilly. As we drove down to Carlsbad Caverns we contemplated what would happen to our trip and the world if capitalism completely collapsed. It was exciting, interesting and downright worrying at the same time. The pound also began to collapse at this point as well. We had watched it drop from 2:1 at the onset of the trip, to 1.75:1. How low was it going to fall? And could someone please put Gordon Brown out of his misery. We arrived at Carlsbad Caverns and they were awesome as you descended into the pits through the natural entrance and past the bat cave mouth. They are so much more impressive than Mammoth caves. We had breakfast down at 800 feet below the Earth's surface which was cool. There was a long trail round the floor of the cavern, taking in the cross shaped roofing, the lower caverns, historical walkways, old rope ladders and underground pools. It was an enchantingly large cavern, though the bottomless pit that sounded so exciting proved to be far from bottomless. It just apparently used to look that way before stronger lights were invented. Very disappointing. They also had weird metal barriers to block people in wheelchairs from accessing steep areas, but it turned into some cruel trap when one old man accidentally went the wrong way. We came out of the caves and heard from Karima. So we headed past the Guadaloupe mountains down to El Paso.

In El Paso we parked up and walked across the border into Chihuahua Mexico and the town of Ciudad Juarez. We got offered taxis to women everywhere we went but managed to resist this con as we headed to a bar for some food and drink. We had no Mexican money so they accepted dollars, but I was concerned as we had not officially entered the place when we crossed over and I wondered how the US customs would react, having remembered my New York experience. The guy at the bar managed to take the piss out of us for our shitty Spanish. Did not fill me with confidence for the Mexican leg of my trip. I then proceeded to spill water all down my crotch in the toilets which added to a general sense of incomptence. As we made our way back to the US border we were herded into some little turnstiles that required change to get through. Ollie promptly entered but I had no change. I had a sudden fear of being trapped in Mexico because I did not have 70 cents. Shit I only had large bills. I was about to abandon all hope, when the border guard directed me to an old woman selling chewing gum. She stiffed me on the price, but I was able to get some gum and some Mexican pesos for the border machine. Having circumnavigated this obstacle we headed back over the guarded bridge and straight into a large queue on the other side to enter the States. I presume a lot of people attempted this crossing everyday for their general shopping so it was a process that most of them were used to. I sweated on the likelihood of being let in until it was our turn to get to the front. the border guard grabbed my passport and asked what we'd gone over for. He then asked why so many British people seem to road trip through here and told me to have a nice day. This was much easier than the border crossing experience we had found in New York City. I think land crossings are much more forgiving than those by plane.

Back in El Paso we met up with Karima and her friend Carmelli out in the starbucks and headed back to hers. We dropped off the car and headed down to the main square for Mexican Independence Day. We were joined by Jessica, Caludia, Aaron and Marcos. We found out most people born in either El Paso or Ciudad Juarez had dual citizenship and that made it easier to traverse the border. In the square we tried chilli crisps and some sweetcorn/cheese thing. They had fireworks and celebrations and we played some weird game of hooking a bottle from lying down to standing up with a rubber hoop on a line. This was orchestrated by an old woman who had earlier leapt into our photo. It was good fun, although we only narrowly failed to ahieve the task and win ourselves $20. We grabbed a load of beer and headed back to Karima's place for a late night drinking session. We exchanged Mexican/British opinions on each other and realised that neither country really has much of a stereotype of the other one. It seems we share senses of humour and both countries are apparently naturally pessimistic. Marcus was the self proclaimed 'only Mexican Republican' from the Yucatan and put us in touch with some people in Alburquerque (we didn't manage to make it there due to a logistical fuck up the next day). Aaron had one of the driest wits I've met. Karima and Jessica retired early. We drank on before the guys and Claudia made their departures. Carmeli stayed drinking with us till 5am and after failing to persuade her to come to Vegas with us, we agreed that we should catch up in Mexico at some point. Maybe in her hometown of Chiuahua. We got a small amount of sleep and after finding my rogue shoes in the morning and cleaning up the place (we had done the same in Athens) we said goodbye to Carmeli and left her with the straw hat. Good time again and we were off into New Mexico.