On the road? Again? Huh?
Yes, yes. Your eyes do not deceive you. You read that correctly. Less than four months later, and I’m back on the road. Again. Although this time, no harebrained detours through Kansas, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, or Nevada, as lovely as they were for my photography. Okay, okay, I’ll concede a little on that point – I must traverse Arizona in order to get to Texas from California. Sheesh. Geography gets me every time, I tell ya.
But this is a different situation entirely. I’m not aimless, I’m not restless, I’m not figuring anything out. In fact, I have it all figured out, save where I’m going to live. And that’s the smallest worry I have had in the past five months. So I’ll take it. Gladly.
However, I can’t claim to be anxiously anticipating the drive. Especially the stretch of road between El Paso and San Antonio. That forsaken, never-ending expanse of barren pavement. It is, hands down, the most terrible, boring, eye-scratchingly awful piece of expressway in this entire country. And I’ve traversed a great deal of highway in the nationwide grid. I was previously convinced that driving through Oklahoma on I-40 couldn’t be topped, but after passing through El Paso into the hilly, uninhabited wasteland comprising the majority of western and central Texas, I’ve found its definitive successor.
Check out the map, for example. Go ahead, click on it. Make it Texas-sized. Now look closer at that highlighted path. Do you notice how there’s absolutely NOTHING between El Paso and San Antonio? No towns, no points of interest, no villages with unpronounceable names? That’s exactly how it is. Eight hours of absolute oblivion. Have you ever seen this sort of nihility? Desperately attempted every trick in the book to entertain your mind so that your brain doesn’t abandon you for a more exciting fate of sizzling on the concrete instead? I have. I swore I’d avoid it at all costs back when I had no idea what Houston was going to mean to me. Suffice it to say that there’s nothing shorter than that there semi-straight line. But logic aside, I am not looking forward to seeing it again.
But I suppose if I’m headed to Houston, I’d better bite the bullet now and realize that the path outlined above? 100% inevitable.
