Trip Postmortem

We arrived back in Las Cruces yesterday afternoon, having indeed broken our trip in Odessa, TX. While we were there on August 1, we saw the Midland petroleum museum--interesting mostly as a manifestation of what museums look like when they are funded by/tailored toward a particular point of view. They have a great collection of vintage pump jacks over there, but the interpretation of the discovery of oil/development of the oil industry, funded by Halliburton, was extremely celebratory.

We had dinner at the second-nicest restaurant in Odessa, which I can recommend. It's an Italian restaurant called Zucchis; in a strip mall but once you go in the decor is lovely, and the food was excellent (although why it was so expensive--over $20 for an entree--is a bit puzzling). We then saw Harry Potter and the Boring Half-Blood Prince and I kept falling asleep. It's very cynical of the Harry Potter franchise-holders to put out a movie that was THAT bad, knowing that people will still come to see it for plot purposes.

On Sunday, we set off bright and early through the rest of West Texas, reached El Paso at lunchtime due to the 80 MPH speed limit (unbelievable!) and found a great Chinese restaurant, Sam's Chinese. Go there, especially if you live in LC where the Chinese food is inedible. Fresh ingredients, tasty sauces, the hot and sour soup was wonderful, and it was inexpensive into the bargain. And then, finally, home.

My assessment of this experience is as follows:

1. Driving across country is worth doing once, especially at this somewhat relaxed pace and if you have more than one driver in the car.

2. Charlotte, NC is a beautiful city.

3. There are a lot of great things about Tennessee. The eastern mountains were amazing. I've already been to Nashville and thought it was pretty good from a historical perspective even though we didn't see it this time. I also really liked Memphis a lot. TN would have been a place that I could have lived other than NM.

4. I still really dislike Texas (sorry, Texas!)

5. Roadfood.com is definitely the place to look for restaurants, but always PHONE first before you head to a place. We were disappointed a couple of times to see that places had gone out of business.

6. A dash-mounted GPS is a must-have for cross-country travel, but you also still need maps and books, preferably from AAA. Also, it's a good idea to check places out on tripadvisor.com or some other similar website ahead of time.

7. There's no reason to make a hotel reservation ahead of time unless you are traveling on a holiday. We only made one reservation, and that was for Forth Worth, and I was able to get a reservation on hotels.com for half off.

8. Another GREAT thing to have is a satellite radio. We used ours every day, for news and talk shows as well as music.

I don't regret our choice to drive at all. Now I just have to clean out the passenger compartment of the car!