Mr Larrington's Automatic Diary: Day 31: Alpine, TX

Alpine, as any fule probably does not kno, is home to vast numbers of small snails which emerge after dark and get trodden on when you go outside for a smoke. This is Not Nice. I'd rather the taranshulas. On the other hand, there is an RV park on the outskirts of town called the "Lost Alaskan". Which is nice.

Today was a short one in terms of time at least, as I spent longer on the Interstate Highway system than any other day so far this year. Kent to El Paso and then a further chunk from El Paso to Las Cruces. The off-piste detour was to visit Target in Far East El Paso (sic). Emily found it in spite of the extensive road-building going on thereabouts - there are so many half-completed flyovers that I expected to see a bus driven by Keanu Reeves on one. Of them.

Target did not have small kettles. Bah! Someone had suggested REI, but Emily has never heard of them and a subsequent application of a Famous Web Search Engine shews that the nearest branch is in Albuquerque. Two hundred and thirty miles away. I will have to improvise my Proper Tea for the rest of the trip, I think.

The first leg of today takes one through the Davis Mountains, which were discovered by my industrious brother-in-law¹ some twenty years ago. These are nice to look at even though it was threatening to rain on them.

A Davis Mountain, yesterday

Mitre Peak looks like the result of giving a small child a crayon and asking them to draw a mountain:

Sorry about the murky weather. I didn't order it.

Another one has McDonald Observatory on top of it:

That's every photo I took today, due to being mostly on I-10 and being disinclined to stop for Puma concolor a.k.a. the cougar, mountain lion or panther I saw near Kent, not least because it was very dead chiz.

I don't know what it is about I-10 that causes it to eat truck tyres - I observed the same phenomenon from Florida to Louisiana two years ago. Surely not just because it's hot, otherwise Arizona would be invisible beneath a mountain of time-expired rubber.

I-10 in Texas is notable also for the number of sets of skid-marks leading off straight bits of the carriageway into either the median strip or the undergrowth on the right. Colour me baffled. The El Paso ring road has a terrific bit over the mountains, though, which is a bit like a 2/3 scale model of I-80 east of Salt Lake City. And just over there / are some wik mountains which I'd take a picture of if it was light, but it isn't as I'm back in the Mountain time zone now. That is enough time zones for this trip i.e. I'm not going back into Arizona with its unorthodox approach to Daylight Saving. I imagine the daylight they do get during the summer is more than adequate in both duration and temperature. Though on the day I arrived in USAnia Phoenix received six inches of rain, which made me rather glad I decided on Denver.

DJ Random was uncommonly keen on Muse today.