The stop in Missouri was effectively the end of our 2005 travel, but we got an early start in 2006 and actually had two separate road trips during the year. It was one of my favorite years of living on the road.
West Texas is mostly wide-open, barren land until you get to El Paso, a bustling town of around 700,000 people right across the border from Juarez, Mexico with more than 2.6 million residents.
Looking across the border into Juarez, it's easy to distinguish it from American communities.
Southern New Mexico is an agricultural region that produces a variety of fruits and vegetables. It has huge cotton fields, and more recently has developed large pecan and pistachio groves. The Rio Grande River is diverted into canals for irrigation, some of which is accomplished by flooding. The irrigation canals are eventually fed back into the river.
Las Cruces is the second largest city in the state, with some 112,000 residents. It was founded in 1848 after the territory was acquired as a result of the Mexican-American War. The U.S. Army arrived to build a fort to protect citizens from raiding Apaches. I was most interested in the Peter Toth sculpture and Our Lady of Health Church.
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La Mesilla is a small village south of Las Cruces, with fewer than 2000 residents. It was formed in 1848 by people who didn't want to live in the U.S. and it was south of the border established by the war. However, in 1853, the Gadsden Purchase brought it into the U.S. It was the largest community in Southern New Mexico, but land owners refused to sell right of way to the new railroad, while Las Cruces gave right of way to the railroad.
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