Why not? The check out time here isn't until 2:00PM and we have less than 60-miles to travel down I-10 to arrive at our next site.
There is also now security personnel patroling the rest area day and night. I'm hoping the truck traffic dies down after dark which will make this a nice and quiet place to overnight.
Lucky for us there was a Walmart Supercenter right next door so we had plenty of room to park ROVER and THE POD.
WARNING: DO NOT expect a tasty meal from the Las Cruces Cracker Barrel location!
I should have known something was amiss when the Cracker Barrel restaurant parking lot was pretty much empty at 8:30AM on a Sunday morning, plus it's Saint Patrick's Day.
Our waitress was only on her second day of her new job at Cracker Barrel and yet she did just fine compared to what the kitchen staff put on our plates to eat.
At the end of our meal the young waitress asked, "How was your meal?", I guess because half of mine was still on the plate. I replied that I'd had much better meals at Cracker Barrel in the past and left it at that. We tipped her for her job well done, but we won't be back.
After breakfast we got a few more items in Walmart before jumping back onto Interstate 10 and heading east for Texas.
I know this is going to sound like I'm doing nothing but complaining this morning, but the condition of Interstate 10 on the northwest side of El Paso is horrendous. It reminds me a lot of I-95 back in Miami, which is perpetually under repair, widening or some kind of construction.
There's one point where over the course of 2-miles the highway merges from 4-lanes down to 1-lane and then remains that way for another half dozen miles. To say the traffic was backed up would be a huge understatement.
For those of you who caught the fact that we are in a Westbound Picnic Area on I-10 for the night, when we were traveling east through Texas, I'll explain.
We intended to spend the night in the Eastbound Picnic Area, but it was very small and completely full when we arrived there at 1:00PM. We returned to I-10 and saw that the westbound picnic area on the other side of the highway was much larger and only a couple of tractor trailer trucks were currently parked there.
A half mile up the road was an exit, so we got off the road, crossed under it, and entered the westbound picnic area.
Along the way we have several sightseeing stops to share with you. Some are new to us and some we've shared before, but that was two years ago.
First up is the Prada Marfa Store, it's a real building, just not a real store. It's a permanent land art installation that was placed in 2005 by a pair of Marfa artists.
Next up is the Marfa TARS (Tethered Aerostat Radar System) balloon.
It is used to patrol over 200-miles of the Texas/Mexico border and is held in place by a 2-mile long nylon cord.
The 208-foot-long balloon, filled with 420,000 cubic feet of helium, contains over a ton of radar equipment. It is one of three active TARS along the Rio Grande River and has been in place since the early 1990s.
Next up is a series of "roadside billboards" that are best seen while travel west on US Highway 90, still west of the town of Marfa.
They are located on the north side of the highway and are dedicated towards memorializing the 1956 movie "Giant", starring James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson.
Today you'll find a small RV Park there, and it too doesn't look like it will be around for very much longer, but it is for sale ($2.6 million) if you're interested.
We finally arrived at the town of Marfa, TX (pop. 1750) and drove right through it to the Marfa Lights Viewing Area located 9-miles east of town.
Here we hope to witness seeing the Marfa Mystery Lights. There are many theories about exactly what the lights are and even if they really exist. This plaque attempts to explain the phenomenon.
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