We fled Flatonia, Texas like it could pursue us.
We’d be back home in the Pacific Northwest in just a few days and, we hoped, bed bug-less. Once on the road, my sweetheart read to me about Flatonia, which boasts 8,000 people and a proud melting pot history.
We sped through San Antonio, a pretty city of light-colored architecture we want to explore some day when we recover from traveling, on I-10. The more I see of America, the more I want to see.
Where El Paso by night looked like the inner circle of hell, as my sweetheart described it, in the daylight it was just another crowded city, baking in the desert heat. We motored on, stopping at a LaQuinta in Fort Stockton, Texas, gleeful at its cleanliness. We bought a little .99 cent moon cactus there, named her Cactus Rose after the Larry McMurtry book, and went on for lunch to the very windy outskirts of Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Las Cruces is a required stop; writer Cate Culpepper and her imagination were nurtured there ("Riverwalker", et. al). We’d planned to visit an Alice B. Readers Appreciation Awards committee member, but messed up our geography and settled for her promise to visit us on the coast.
This article appears in May 16-22, 2013.