Posted Thursday but about my adventures on Wednesday

Heading West

After grappling with an industrial size waffle-making machine in the breakfast room at the motel I returned to the Museum of the Pacific War to see the last few exhibits I had missed yesterday.

On the way out of town I passed the local court house and thought I’d drop in to get some law and order action. Unfortunately the only matter being heard today, a civil action, had just been settled by the parties and there was nothing else scheduled for today; so much for out of control litigation in the US.

I left Fredericksburg and headed west on US 290; stopping in the small town of Harper to buy some stamps for postcards that a few lucky recipients will be getting once I’ve written something on the postcards and posted them.

Harper seemed to have at most a couple of hundred inhabitants but two taxidermists; a business I had noticed with increasing frequency the further I got from Dallas. It must be all the hunting that they do with the guns that are on sale on every main street. What constitutes a sufficient area of land for hunting seems to be fairly small; I saw a 50 acre property advertised as a ‘hunting paradise’; if you shot at something on 50 acres and missed you’d probably kill your neighbours

Shortly after leaving Harper I joined Interstate 10, which runs from California to Florida. Roads here (so far) are of exceptional quality (if only I’d brought the Porsche) and it is amazing to think there still is not a divided road between Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

As I drove west at a constant 140kmh the terrain became flatter and the vegetation sparser. By the time I reached Ozona, where I stopped for lunch, I was driving along very wide valleys between mesas; I expected to be attacked by Commanches at any time as the scenery was so familiar from cowboy and Indian (arrow not dot) movies.

I had lunch at the Hitchin’ Post (recommended if you Google ‘eat Ozona’). The burger I had was strangely described as a British Burger because it had bacon and cheese (the latter of an alarmingly bright yellow colour in common with cheese in the US).

Afterwards I walked around the town square, saw the statue of Davy Crockett (who died fighting at the Alamo in San Antonio; anyone except me remember Duffy from F-Troop on TV and his story about the Alamo?) and visited the Crockett County Museum. The museum had a strange variety of objects on display and doesn’t, I suspect, get many visitors as my arrival caused the attendant to look at me like she’s seen a ghost. Under her watchful eye I added my ‘voluntary’ donation of $3 to the collection box. In one room a large display of pencils and pens was juxtaposed with a collection of barbed wire (described as Barb Wire as though it was collected by someone of that name). However, not all displays were mirth-making as there was a school room from the early 1900s set up in one of the rooms and in another was a local store with shelves stacked to the ceiling with goods.

Continuing west I saw oil wells being drilled and oil being pumped from the ground by those pumps that have a nodding motion and also crossed the Pecos River and recalled a line from some western of years ago where someone says “Ain’t no law west of the Pecos’.

I arrived at Fort Stockton about 4.30pm (35C and 0% humidity) and decided that I’d done enough driving for the day. I hadn’t booked a motel for tonight but there were plenty advertising vacancies along the main road through the town. The Motel 6 offered an all-inclusive (bed and running water) service for $56.

I had Mexican for dinner as this is the closest I’ll get to Mexico. One of the side dishes was a large green chili stuffed with minced beef; which proved to be much spicier than the first couple of mouthfuls indicated. There were two men eating dinner wearing cowboy hats but I couldn’t find a surreptitious way to take a photo of them; and they looked like the sort of men who wouldn’t have left their guns at home.