Day 2.4: El Paso, TX to San Antonio, TX

We woke up at 7am to get an early start, beginning with thirty minutes on the treadmill in the hotel’s fitness center. We went to the hotel breakfast and proactively made lunch to take with us so that we wouldn’t have to stop on our drive - a lackluster peanut butter and banana sandwich for Abe and a blueberry bagel with cream cheese for Arielle. As we drove, we once again made the mistake of letting our gas tank run to empty, panicking for about 33 miles to reach the next station. Miraculously, we made it and our odometer even hit 400 miles exactly, a sight we thought we would never see (and did not capture in the below photo, taken a few tense minutes later).

While we hope to see it again, we would like it to come with less anxiety. Puzzlingly, after filling up the tank, our light came on much sooner on the next drive, and we only made it to about 300 miles even though we were driving on cruise control the same speed the whole time.

We made it to San Antonio around 6:15pm and made a stop at CVS before heading to Green’s Vegetarian Cuisine, which also happens to be certified kosher. We had dinner with Miguel, a member of the local Conservative synagogue, Agudas Achim, who is an ethicist, and his wife Roble. He and Arielle had plenty to talk about, and the spouses enjoyed themselves too. Arielle ordered a combination of appetizers: the fried pickles, which were delicious, fried cauliflower with barbecue sauce (which only Abe ate), and nachos, which were awesome. Abe ordered the eggplant parmesan, which was quite tasty.

After a lovely conversation, we said goodbye and then went over to Baskin Robbins, where Arielle got three different flavors in a single scoop - Winter White Chocolate, Love Potion #31, and Mint Chocolate Chip. Abe got a single scoop of just one flavor, the World Class Chocolate.

We drove about fifteen minutes to our hotel, and marveled at the number of turnarounds and loops that exist on the roads of this city. We pulled in to the Drury Inn and Suites San Antonio - North Oak, adjacent to the Drury Plaza Abe had stayed at on his previous visit to the city back in November 2016. We had missed the free dinner offered earlier but still got to visit the hot tub before it closed, which was very hot and nice. We went to sleep with plans for yet another early start the next morning.

Approximate number of miles covered: 562

Day 2.3: Phoenix, AZ to El Paso, TX

We got up at 7am and spent some time reorganizing things in the car. We said goodbye to Mike and drove to Butterfield’s, where we met Shira, who Abe first met in USY and Arielle knew from a summer on staff at Camp Ramah in New England. Abe enjoyed his banana pancakes and home fries, and Arielle loved her garden skillet and wildberry bliss pancakes while we heard about Shira’s life as a traveling nurse.

We stopped one last time at Coffee Bean and to get gas before leaving Phoenix so that we could avoid the near-disaster of running low the day before. We drove a few hours and crossed into New Mexico, navigating enormous tumbleweeds flying at us all across the freeway.

We stopped at Kranberry’s Chatterbox, a small restaurant in Lordsburg, where Arielle heated up leftovers from that morning and Abe got grilled cod with fried zucchini (decent but unspectacular). Arielle was thrilled to be able to get gas across the street for less than $2, a sight she wasn’t sure she had ever before seen. We continued on our drive, crossing into Texas, and got to El Paso around 5pm, where we were perplexed that Waze seemed to send us off the 10 freeway only to get right back on, before realizing that it was actually putting us on another very helpful and completely abandoned off ramp that enabled us to miss a lot of traffic. We also noticed that we were extremely close to Mexico, with Juarez just on the other side of the freeway.

We pulled in to the Holiday Inn Express El Paso - Central and checked in to our very nice room. We had a nice phone call with our friend Dave and spent a few minutes catching up on emails and blog posts. We drove about five minutes to Crave, a restaurant recommended by our El Paso local friend Blair. Arielle wanted to get the cauliflower tacos but they were out of cauliflower, which our waitress said was crazy because they had sent her to buy cauliflower on the way to work that morning, so she got the Impossible Burger instead, which was delicious. Abe ordered the harvest bowl, without the lemon thyme vinaigrette of course, and found it a bitter. Finding what he thought was cinnamon butter that had come with Arielle’s delicious sweet potato fries to be very tasty, he proceeded to add generous portions to his bowl, only to later find out that it was homemade marshmallow sauce (which Arielle got to go). It certainly did go well with the vegetables and added garlic mushrooms, which still makes little sense.

We thought that we would stroll down Cincinnati St because it looked cool and lit up, but mostly closed shops and frigid temperatures truncated the length of our walk. Most of the remainder of the night was spent struggling to connect to the hotel wi-fi, which never worked, and FaceTiming with our friends Teri and Aaron. Exhausted, we fell asleep early.

Approximate number of miles covered: 458