More Texas!

Driving through Texas seems like it will never end. In west Texas near the border, we drove 100 miles through almost uninhabited land to get to El Paso.

We have been facinated with what is going on along the Mexican border, given all that is reported in the news. We noticed that in Lajitas and Terlingua, there is little evidence of Customs and Border Patrol. There are no roads across or official border entry points around here and it is easy to just walk across the border. Then we realized that there is only one road and hundreds of miles of arrid, difficult terrain to cross. Border patrol did have a set up 20 miles up the road, which is probably pretty effective because it would be difficult to survive the walk.

There must be talk of building “the wall” here because we passed this sign: “No wall. Rednecks for Beto and Will Hurd”

We also passed this and discovered that the Tethered Areostat Radar System (TARS) are blimps that watch over the southern border for low flying drug smuggling airplanes. Customs authorities estimated that by the early 1980s, as many as 8,500 illegal flights per year were transporting narcotics directly from the Caribbean, Central or South America into the U.S .