Alamo to Kerrville, TX via Laredo

We were on the road by 7:45 this morning. Good bye to Bibleville. Several people have approached Steve about coming back. "We need more younger speakers," one said. "They keep dying off." We're open to it.

We hadn't gone far when we came upon this border check. We thought it would be a big deal, but the guy just asked, "All American citizens?" as we rolled by.



US 83 follows the Rio Grande. It was four lanes lined with gas stations, auto parts stores and pawn shops until Roma. After that the road narrowed to two lanes with scrub on either side that reminded us of Mato Grosso. Or northern Botswana. There were two yellow lines down the middle maybe 18-24 inches apart--enough to keep on-coming traffic apart--and a good wide shoulder. So just as in Africa, even though the road was only one lane each direction, whenever we came up behind a slower vehicle, they pulled off and drove on the shoulder so we could go around without waiting for a break in on-coming traffic. As in Africa, Steve would turn on his emergency blinkers for two blinks as we passed to say thank you. I only thought later that I should have taken a picture of the road.

We turned north at Laredo. We had been warned not to go into the city because "it's dangerous there." (They were forgetting the places like Ethiopia, Mozambique and Tembisa where we have lived and worked.) We weren't planning to stop in Laredo anyway. We did wonder if the fancy homes we saw along the way belonged to drug lords.

Our goal was the scenic route heading east from Leakey into the hill country. I took this picture of Mom with my phone because it has GPS and I wanted a location pin I could use on the photos from my "real" camera. It placed a pin, but we were remote enough it couldn't come up with a name for the place, but the next photo is the view from a few steps up the road.

Lots of beautiful views, steep descents, bluffs, hairpin curves, but virtually no places to pull off and take a picture. We did see lots of these flash flood gauges at every dip in the road. More than once we had to stop for one way traffic as they fixed places that had washed out in the recent rains. Saw a couple houses built on stilts although they didn't seem to me to be "that close" to the streams. Part of me would love to be there in a rain storm, but the other part of me wouldn't like to spend the night in the car because there were flooded places both in front and behind.



Steve wanted to look for a Texas BBQ place for supper, but the only two in Kerrville (at least that the hotel clerk knew about) are closed on Monday. He went on line looking for tomorrow lunch. Tonight we ate instant raman noodles in the room with cheese and crackers and carrots and broccholi that I bought from the vege wagon on Saturday. Mom and I were glad not to go out, and Steve is deep into Monday Night Football.

We don't have far to go tomorrow. There is more that we want to explore in the hills, but then we end up in Austin with Steve's college classmate, Larry (and wife Dolly) Abrams. We are close enough to Austin that we suspect some of the ranches we saw today are weekend places for the wealthy from the capital.