Day 40 -- Big Spring to El Paso, Texas -- 344 Miles

Today was the BIG PUSH to get across Texas as fast as possible and expedite our return home since the snow started falling there. Since there's no heat on in the house we're a little concered with how the pipes will fare if they experience even colder temperatures.

As you know, if you've been reading our blog for any length of time, we usually try to keep mileage to about 150 miles a day. Sometimes if we can't quite find a camp where we need it to be, we'll push it up to 200 miles. Beyond that distance, it's just too tedious.

However, the distance from McKinney, Texas, where we visited with family, to the Texas/New Mexico border totalled just under 700 miles, a mind-numbing figure for our tolerance for long days. Still, towns in between seemed to be few, and we couldn't really find many camps advertised.

So yesterday when we left Mckinney we ended up driving 315 miles, and today we wracked up another 344 Miles to reach El Paso. Tomorrow we will probably have to do another 340 miles to reach Tuscon. It's not something I'm looking forward to, but if we get an early start it is doable.

The worst part about high-mileage days is it prevents us from visiting any off-the-highway points of interest. Today we passed the Museum for the Pecos, which I feel we would have enjoyed. The history of Judge Roy Bean, known as "The Law West of the Pecos" in the 1880s has always been interesting to me.

Still, even though we didn't get to visit any fascinating points of interest, we did get to witness one of the most fascinating cities we've ever seen, albeit from our RV seats, as we passed through the Midland/Odessa metropolitan area of Texas.

If you're unfamiliar with the Midland/Odessa area, you probably have not been paying attention to what insiders are calling the Permian Basin oil deposit. For a discussion of the Permian basin, I turned to Wikipedia: "The Permian Basin is a large sedimentary basin in the southwestern part of the United States. The basin contains the Mid-Continent Oil Field province. This sedimentary basin is located in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico. It reaches from just south of Lubbock, past Midland and Odessa, south nearly to the Rio Grande River in southern West Central Texas, and extending westward into the southeastern part of New Mexico."

"It is so named because it has one of the world's thickest deposits of rocks from the Permian geologic period. The greater Permian Basin comprises several component basins; of these, the Midland Basin is the largest, Delaware Basin is the second largest, and Marfa Basin is the smallest. The Permian Basin covers more than 86,000 square miles (220,000 km2), and extends across an area approximately 250 miles (400 km) wide and 300 miles (480 km) long."

"The Permian Basin lends its name to a large oil and natural gas producing area, part of the Mid-Continent Oil Producing Area. Total production for that region up to the beginning of 1993 was over 14.9 billion barrels (2.37×109 m3). The Texas cities of Midland, Odessa and San Angelo serve as the headquarters for oil production activities in the basin."

Personally, I've been pertty worried about the anti-oil attitude of our present government. It seemed to me that they were on an accelerated path to destroy our oil industry. But after riding through Midland/Odessa, Texas today, I'm feeling more confident that our oil industry is NOT down for the count and is going to outlast our shortsighted government leaders.

Today, we saw dozens and dozens of brand new buildings, housing every imaginable form of business, lining both sides of the Interstate for miles. Many of the businesses obviously catered to the oil business, such as those that provided drilling components. But most of the businesses couldn't be tied directly to drilling.

For instance, there appeared to be litterally thousands of work trucks of all descriptions, from pickups to large flatbed mainenance trucks dashing hither and yon on the frontage roads. And lining those roads were the dealers to sell them. There were dealers providing the tractor component of tractor-trailer rigs. There were other dealers selling the trailers or vans that could be pulled by those tractors. We even saw about three dozen brand new oil tanker trailers sitting in just one spot on the south side of the Interstate.

On the construction side, there were all manner of businesses providing the materials needed to build all the new buildings that housed the burgeoning number of small businesses. Businesses offering electricians, sheetmetal work, boiler and HVC work, plumbing related, hydraulics related, and, well, you name it and it was there.

But the part that amazed us the most was the veritible "explosion" in the number of dwelling units for all the workers who have moved to Midland/Odessa to work in the oil business and the various support businesses. Every single block contained a subdivision of tiny houses of all descriptions, prefab apartments on wheels and on foundations, or sophisticated apartment buildings three and four stories high. There were also RV camps for those who brought their own housing which were tucked in behind many of the newly-constructed businesses. We even saw three HUGE, four-story apartments that were being constructed on an elevated steel girder system that, presumably, would allow the entire apartment building to be relocated at some point if the need arose.

Naturally, getting through Midland/Odessa was a bit hairy because of the crush of traffic and all the work trucks merging onto the Interstate. But we didn't really mind as we were getting to see an American economy going gangbusters that was simply too good to miss. All too often on our travels we see countless towns where the economic viability vanished years ago. Seeing Midland/Odessa was a very welcome change.

By the way, the photos of Midland/Odessa were not shot by me, but were captured on the web in order to provide some visual backup for my narrative.