Travel Review: El Paso, TX

Another periodic addition to the blog will be reviews of some of my travels where I actually get a decent layover. My long layovers (24+ hrs) with Continental have been: Boston, MA, San Diego, CA, San Francisco, CA, San Juan, P.R., Aquadilla, P.R., Santo Domingo, Dom Rep, Houston, TX, Denver, CO, Orange County, CA, Indianapolis, IN, San Antonio, TX, Jacksonville, FL, Providence, RI, Mexico City, MEX, Newark, NJ (NYC) off the top of my head. On long layovers I always get out and check out the city. So I can provide a 1 day snapshot on any of these locations, just ask!

Today I will review the long layover I just got back from. 35+ hrs in El Paso, TX aka Hell Paso, TX.

El Paso is the most Western portion of Texas. A mere almost 1000 miles from the most Eastern border of Texas. It is a high desert that sits about 4000ft above sea level. The Southern tip of the Rockies cut down through the middle of this town topping at about 7000ft. The trees on the mountains are the kind that don't need much water, cacti and underbrush cover the rest. It looks like a big brownish rocky covered mountain, but picturesque. I caught it on an unusually warm Feb day that reached almost into the 70's without a cloud in the desert sky.

My Chevy Cobalt took me into the mountains for a short hike that started with a Mexican girl (5yrs old or so) throwing her bottled beverage at me. Don't no why, other than that I was the ONLY gringo where the dozen or so Mexican families were picnicing. Side note, this was not the first trash I noticed, it seems more common to just throw your picnic trash down towards the ravine than put it into the plethora of garbage cans along the picnic area. Oh well. America the beautiful.

So after I unsuccessfully stared down the 5 yr old and the mother that was 5 feet away from the daughter, and saw the whole thing, I started a short hike. You see El Paso has a population of around 600,000 but across the 10 ft wide Rio Grande and a chain link fence lies Juarez, Mexico with a population double that of Hell Paso. My plan was to hike up a little higher to get an even better view than the picnic area overlook had to offer. The sun beating down on the rocks made them nice and warm to the touch. An earlier conversation I had about how the rattlesnakes wake up and sun on the warm rocks in this kind of weather kept resonating in my head. Since I knew my New Balance sneakers offered no snake bite protection my enthusiasm died quickly and I did not accomplish my goal. I walked back past the polluters and drove on in to downtown.

Like most border towns in Mexico, the pedestrian border crossing and car crossing offer most of the city life. It is pretty much the same in both Mexico and the US. Shops full of stuff, in a market-like atmosphere. People are hawking everything. I resisted the temptation of peddlers selling desserts from grocery carts they were pushing. One item was a banana on a stick sprinkled with something. The other was a bunch of stuff mixed up in a cup. Very little English spoken in this area.

The Sun Bowl stadium at the University Texas El Paso is on the edge of downtown. Very unique architecture, obviously very influenced by the border. Ft. Bliss and Biggs Army Airfield proved the main source of non-Mexican people. My guess would be that 80% of El Paso is Mexicans.

On my you should visit meter with 1 being "stay home and go to the dentist instead" and 10 being "you actually are still reading this and haven't booked your Continental tickets yet"

I give El Paso a 3. Mostly because the coolest things I found were anywhere from 30 mins to a 2 hour drive away, not necessarily in El Paso, and in the summer it IS as hot as Hell.