Spanish for "The Construction."

We set off from Pecos on what seemed to be the last day of our trip. It simply wasn't all that much further to Tucson. Liz took the wheel. Betsy grabbed a "cereal and milk" bar and a banana from the hotel. And... wheeeee!

As we drove through the remainder of the big nothing, I got to wondering about the word "roadkill." Isn't it strange that "kill" is being used as a noun? Wouldn't "roaddead" make more sense? But it's kind of funny. Roadkill. haha. There's something kind of slangy about it, yet it's an actual word. It's in Webster's: : the remains of an animal that has been killed on a road by a motor vehicle. And the date is 1972. Who knew? Does anyone have further info on this?

We promptly came thisclose to running over a snake. A SNAKE.

It slowly starts to get more interesting. We can see some rising and falling. Some mountains in the distance. (Are they really mountains, or just clouds or shadows? No, they're really mountains.) Everything goes from dusty tan to a kind of reddish color. The mountains get bigger and closer. And they had a scenic overlook! That's what the picture was from. Very scenic indeed! We even saw some lizards!

We finally made it to El Paso. And noticed:
1. It was under construction. Like, a lot of it. Real pain in the ass.
2. There seem to be two chief industries: pawn shops and bail bonds. Just in case you couldn't quite make it to Mexico. Haha. Ha. But seriously. Every time we turned around, we saw another sign for bail bonds.

So we drove around the city for a little while, saw some stray dogs and not much else, and decided to keep going. We'd considered having some lunch there, but it just all looked kind of... poor and dirty. And we were getting a little tired.

I would like to take this opportunity to let you all know that while we are getting perilously close to our destination, some pretty funny things happened in Tucson, too, so I'll keep blogging, though perhaps not quite as excitingly or religiously, once the road trip is over. You can hear about things like Bugsy and the awesome free bike show and the biggest hot dog I have ever seen and death by chocolate.

That being said, we're not there yet. We still have to stop for a late lunch and come up with an awesome nickname for my new state. So don't touch that dial.