right on bro!

Went to the Alamo yesterday. I was there a long time ago but everything looked completely new to me. It was here back in 1836 that Texas had declared its independence (indeed, the United States recognized Texas as an independent country for about ten years). General Santa Anna, the self-proclaimed dictator of Mexico, was pissed off about that, and sent thousands of troops to crush the insurgents. The Texans (along with some volunteers, including David Crockett and his troops from Tennessee) hid the women and children in the Alamo’s inner sanctuary, and Colonel Travis allegedly drew his famous line in the sand and asked his troops to cross the line and stay with him. (One person left.) A 16-day siege of the Alamo ended in an early morning attack on the last day, when the Mexican army overran the Texans, and the Alamo fell. Later on that year, the Texas army captured General Santa Anna and forced him to leave Texas alone.

Also strolled along the Riverwalk - which is more like Creekwalk, but it’s certainly nice enough - restaurants & shops that line a river (creek) that runs throughout downtown San Antonio. Ate lunch at the Original Mexican Restaurant. If it were truly the original, I think they would have just called it a day for Mexican cuisine - La Parilla in Los Angeles kicks its ass any day of the week.

That was it. Jumped back along the 10, and drove west. Southern Texas looked like New Mexico a little bit - desert hills again - for about two hours, and then it got dark. I smelled oil around Bakersfield, so I figure there were some oil rigs around there, but wasn’t able to see anything.

I stopped at around 11 PM in Van Horn, Texas for the night. Van Horn is kind of a sketchy little town about 125 miles east of El Paso. I ate dinner at a truckstop restaurant, and this is where something cool happened - I got a ten dollar bill with my change, that was stamped with a wheresgeorge.com stamp. You can go to this site and enter the serial number of any bill you have, and it’ll show you where other users have had the bill. It’s rare that you encounter one of these stamped bills (since defacing U.S. currency is illegal), so there aren’t that many bills on the site, but it’s worth checking out. I’ve gotten one other bill in my lifetime, and that was in Vegas, and the site showed that the bill had been in Vegas before. This is much cooler - my ten dollar bill started in Columbus, OH back in January. I wonder how it got to Van Horn.

I’m eager to get out of Texas. I’ve been traveling for a week and a half since I left my brother’s place, and I’m a bit anxious to get home, since Arizona and New Mexico aren’t new territory for me. I think I’ve got one more thing to see, and then I might just do a straight drive home. We’ll see.

I’ll upload photos either at my next stop, or early next week.