Yeah, you read that correctly – 900 miles. Think about that for a minute. 900 miles is the Irish equivalent of travelling from Dublin to Galway SEVEN TIMES! IN ONE DAY! This was the task ahead of me this morning as I woke in Tucson, Arizona, at a long way past the 4am slot I’d given myself. Only leaving the hotel at 7.30 after robbing some ice for the journey (I actually only had 741 miles to do, or so I thought in my head!), I went across the street to get a new case of water in the CVS pharmacy and then into the Shell station to fill the Malibu with gas for the first time that day. Out on the road, it was pretty much what you’d expect – traffic, road noise, stifling heat and desert.

There really isn’t much to say here. I drove basically across the State of Arizona, the ENTIRE State of New Mexico and pretty much half the State of Texas in one day. Having left the hotel at 7.30 (so let’s say I left Tucson at 8am after gas and supplies), I crept into a sleepy Austin at half past midnight. That’s 14 hours solid. Of that 14 hours, I probably was stopped for about 1 hour – I had a coffee and a chat at a Starbucks in El Paso, Texas, for about 30 minutes and some other stuff too including 2 further fuel stops.

Actually it’s slightly more, but I’m rounding it down. But it’s not about 920 miles. I can’t actually tell for certain because I didn’t trip the odometer to see – but Google it if you want… I started at the Varsity Clubs of America hotel in Tucson, Arizona, and ended in the Casulo Hotel in Austin, Texas. Google says 892 miles, but there were some deviations on that that push it over the 900 miles – including a tour of a suburb of El Paso because of a one-way street and the fact that I had no GPS for most of the journey (equals MUCHO FUN!). And time wise, I drove two stretches of 5 hours without stopping – once!

Observations? Well, America is big. Very big. But surprisingly it’s not as big as you think. Yeah sure you spend hours driving from one end to the other, but in reality, the country itself is made up of cities linked by Interstate highways, and in between is very little. Now, let me preface that by saying “in between the Interstates” – obviously the Interstates take the most boring routes, the really interesting stuff is on the old highways, which are there a lot longer than the Eisenhower Interstate System. Another observation is that New Mexico (from the Interstates and previous visits) is the most desolate of all the States I’ve visited, and along the interstate, is chock full of Indian ‘trading posts’. These things are a bit of an eye sore and really must be a source of embarrassment for the tribes who live off these reservations. 10-15 massive billboard signs along the highway advertising “24-hour pumps”, “turquoise jewellry”, “fireworks” etc. And then you see the place, a small building with a gas station out front and not a single car in the lot. If these tribes are to ever really make it big, they have to come up with something better than a trading post offering sweet fuck all to the travelling tourists or their love affair with casinos and gambling. In my opinion, that is not a way to sustain a culture and if they keep going on this path, there won’t be much of the smaller Indian tribes left to tend their reservations beyond the next 2 generations.

Another stark observation is the two sides to El Paso, Texas. El Paso lies on the border of the United States of America and Mexico, separated by the Rio Grande (or “Big River” in Spanish). Across that river is the Mexican city of Juaréz. The contrast is amazing. On the American side, a simple thing like buildings having windows, is contrasted by the Juarez hand-plastered adobe-style buildings having no windows. It’s that black and white. If you didn’t know that you were looking across the divide, you’d know instinctively that something was different – vastly different. The rest of Texas was dark as I poked my way through on the first Interstate where I was permitted to travel at 80mph. Though to be fair, this didn’t make the journey go any faster by any tangible measure. I guess the over-riding sense I had coming into the State was one of the conditioning of Hollywood and the US media – a State which is staunchly Republican, fiercely defendant of their second-amendment rights, and one where oil exploration and drilling is a right and privilege. But getting off the Interstate to cross the real State of Texas to Austin, I passed a series of towns like Fredericksburg (Wikipedia Article) which had a series of German streets crossing the road before coming to the town – they even had ‘Strasse’ (or correctly ‘Straße’ – but not spelled the same) in their names. Despite the Chevron forecourt being pretty much over-run by huge black beetles, the rest of the town is really pretty, lots of little stores and small businesses, more than a few galleries (hinting that it’s mainly a tourist trap now) and just generally the same kind of ‘small town America’ street-scape you see on Hollywood movies. Two more towns beyond that also resembled something similar, but I was struck by how pretty Fredericksburg was. Unfortunately however, it’s an hour away so I’m not in any great shape to go backward on the journey to check it out during the day.