BBQ, border crossings, and buck naked bald men

As I said in a previous post, on my trip down to Texas from Seattle, I decided to stop in a couple of cities that I’d been wanting to see. One of those cities was NOT El Paso. The only reason I stopped in El Paso was to get something to eat and get some rest. I was really happy to see a Texas BBQ joint next to my hotel. I had never been to a Rudy’s before (they’re building one here in Katy – YAY!) and boy-howdy, what a treat! As soon as I walked in they started pushing samples of different types of BBQ’d meat at me. And samples of their version of creamed corn and some kind of spicy vegetarian chili. It was all so dag-gum good. It was a tough decision but I decided to go with the ribs. There were two kinds of sauce. There was the regular sauce and something called the Sissy sauce. I tried them both and I couldn’t decide which one I liked better so I alternated them the whole time I was chowing down on the ribs. Everything there was good, including the BBQ’d beans and the creamed corn. Rudy’s was the highlight of my stop in El Paso. After the boring drive from Tucson to El Paso, I was exhausted, so after pigging out on pork (HA!), I climbed in to the giant, comfy bed at the hotel and passed out. I woke up feeling pretty good and decided to get on the road first thing after a shower and breakfast. By 7:00am, I was back in Magnum and we were rolling on to I-10 with San Antonio set on the GPS as our next destination. I was happy to be leaving El Paso behind because from what I saw, there wasn’t much there except strip malls and lots of dust. After less than five minutes on the freeway, all lanes of traffic heading east came to a complete halt. WTF? And I had just started seeing very large signs announcing border crossings in to Mexico. For some reason, I started to get nervous. Did I accidently get into a Mexico border crossing lane? I turned on the radio to see if there was news about the traffic jam. It was still pretty cool, about 70 degrees (funny how your perspective of what’s cool changes pretty quickly after leaving the Pacific Northwest), so I rolled the window down. I couldn’t find anything on the radio about what the traffic jam was all about, but I did get to hear lots of perky voices speaking Spanish and who doesn’t like happy-sounding Mexican music? After about 15 or 20 minutes stuck in the traffic jam, moving very slowly, making almost no progress, I hear a man yelling HELP! HELP! at the top of his lungs. I look around to see where it’s coming from. In the lanes on the freeway traveling the opposite way, the traffic was moving much better than the direction I was headed, and running down I-10 in the middle of swiftly moving traffic, I see the source of the yelling. It’s a Hispanic man, naked from the waist up, covered in tattoos, bald head, yelling HELP! and trying to grab onto every vehicle that whizzes by him. I fully expected to see someone run the guy down, then I saw a bunch of police cars speeding down the freeway after him. I had become very invested in the half-naked yelling man saga that was happening right next to me. Then the traffic started moving again. Dang it. I’ll never know what that was all about. The traffic jam on my side of the freeway was about three smashed cars right in the middle of I-10. So at least I found out what was going on there, and I wasn’t accidently in a lane to go across the Mexico border. That was a relief. But not as much of a relief as it was to get some miles between me and El Paso.